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Current Events & History

What’s Up with Daylight Saving Time? A Brief History and Analysis with Wolfram Language

In the next few days, most people in the United States, Canada, Cuba, Haiti and some parts of Mexico will be transitioning from “standard” (or winter) time to “daylight” (or summer) time. This semiannual tradition has been the source of desynchronized alarm clocks, missed appointments and headaches for parents trying to get kids to bed at the right time since 1908, but why exactly do we fiddle with the clocks two times a year?

Nick Lariviere, Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
Current Events & History

How Many Days Would February Have if the Earth Rotated Backward? Exploring Leap Years with Wolfram Language

Happy Leap Day 2024! A leap day is an extra day (February 29) that is added to the Gregorian calendar (the calendar most of us use day to day) in leap years. While leap years most commonly come in four-year intervals, they sometimes come every eight years. This is because a traditional leap day every four years is actually a slight overcompensation in the calendar. Thus, a leap year is skipped every one hundred years when those years are not divisible by 400 (this is actually the entire difference between the Julian and the Gregorian calendars).
José Martín-García, Algorithms R&D
Current Events & History

Classical Ciphers to Digital Signatures Wolfram U Launches New Cryptography Course

Cryptography has been around since time immemorial, and in the modern technological age is an omnipresent, often invisible middleman that helps protect your data. As a field of study, it combines mathematics, computer science, physics and even linguistics. As a tool, it concerns informatics, business, finance, politics, human rights—any sector that deals with personal information or requires communication. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a sector that cryptography does not impact.
Dariia Porechna, Cryptography and Blockchain, Wolfram Language Development
Current Events & History

Celebrating a Third of a Century of Mathematica, and Looking Forward

Celebrating a Third of a Century of Mathematica, and Looking Forward

Mathematica 1.0 was launched on June 23, 1988. So (depending a little on how you do the computation) today is its one-third-century anniversary. And it’s wonderful to see how the tower of ideas and technology that we’ve worked so hard on for so long has grown in that third of a century—and how tall it’s become and how rapidly it still goes on growing.

In the past few years, I’ve come to have an ever-greater appreciation for just how unique what we’ve ended up building is, and just how fortunate our original choices of foundations and principles were. And even after a third of a century, what we have still seems like an artifact from the future—indeed ever more so with each passing year as it continues to grow and develop.

In the long view of intellectual history, this past one-third century will be seen as the time when the computational paradigm first took serious root, and when all its implications for “computational X” began to grow. And personally I feel very fortunate to have lived at the right time in history to have been able to be deeply involved with this and for what we have built to have made such a contribution to it.

Stephen Wolfram
Current Events & History

Change Your Perspective on the History of Mathematics with These Eight Learning Journeys

Amid COVID’s first wave, I had the privilege to join forces with Eric Weisstein and his team at Wolfram Research to create the History of Mathematics Project, a virtual interactive gallery highlighting physical artifacts that are important to the history of mathematics, for the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) in New York City. Most of my mandatory confinement at home was spent navigating through online collections from world-class museums, locating outstanding mathematical artifacts and creating interactive and computational explanations for them.
Bernat Espigulé-Pons, OSW Operations
Current Events & History

John Snow & the Birth of Epidemiology Data Analysis & Visualization

In 1854, there was a major cholera outbreak in Soho, a neighborhood in London that Judith Summers described as full of “cow-sheds, animal droppings, slaughterhouses, grease-boiling dens and primitive, decaying sewers.” At the time, the cause of the outbreak was unknown because germ theory was still being developed and disease transmission was not well understood. Miasma theory was the dominant hypothesis, and it proposed that diseases, including cholera and the plague, were spread by foul gasses emitted from decomposing organic matter.
Roman Parker, Community Advancement Mads Bahrami, Academic Innovation Support
Current Events & History

The Singular Euler–Maclaurin Expansion A New Twist to a Centuries-Old Problem

Of all mathematical operations, addition is the most basic: It’s what we learn first in school. Historically, it is the most ancient. While the simple task of getting the sum of two numbers is simple, sums of many numbers can easily turn into a challenging numerical problem if the number of summands is very large.

Andreas A. Buchheit, Guest Author Torsten Keßler, Guest Author
Current Events & History

Is Your Function Continuous? Squaring Away the New Function Properties in the Wolfram Language

[Wolfram_Notebook_Download]

The Wolfram Language has several hundred built-in functions, ranging from sine to Heun. As a user, you can extend this collection in infinitely many ways by applying arithmetic operations and function composition. This could lead you to defining expressions of bewildering complexity, such as the following:

&#10005 f = SinhIntegral[ LogisticSigmoid[ ScorerHi[Tanh[AiryAi[HermiteH[-(1/2), x] - x + 1]]]]];
You may then ask, “Is continuous?” or “Can be written as a composition of an increasing function with another function?” The powerful new tools for studying function properties in Version 12.2 provide quick answers to such questions—opening the doors for applying a network of theorems and ideas that have been developed by mathematicians during the last few centuries.
Devendra Kapadia, Manager of Calculus and Algebra, Algorithms R&D
Current Events & History

The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher

In 2020, Melbourne, Australia, had a 112-day lockdown of the entire city to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The wearing of masks was mandatory and we were limited to one hour a day of outside activity. Otherwise, we were stuck in our homes. This gave me lots of time to look into interesting problems I’d been putting off for years.

I was inspired by a YouTube video by David Oranchak, which looked at the Zodiac Killer’s 340-character cipher (Z340), which is pictured below. This cipher is considered one of the holy grails of cryptography, as at the time the cipher had resisted attacks for 50 years, so any attempts to find a solution were truly a moonshot.

Sam Blake, Guest Author
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