I am always intrigued by the many ways people use Mathematica. But it was even more exciting to be a part of the American Chemical Society Fall 2009 National Meeting and hear the true excitement and awe of our users' latest discoveries of what is possible in Mathematica. I also had a lot of fun introducing new users to our software! In August, we traveled to ACS in beautiful Washington, DC, USA. The ACS meeting brought together the largest scientific society and its members' families, colleagues, and students. It provided an ideal venue to demonstrate Mathematica's capabilities in chemistry and chemical engineering. We demonstrated a broad range of features, including Mathematica 7's fully curated chemical, genomic, and proteomic data, built-in parallelization capabilities, and unsurpassed modeling and visualization capabilities. The ability to visualize any data as well as update it on the fly has bridged a gap many researchers and scientists have had to work around when using other tools. You can even rapidly develop and test algorithms as well as generate accurate structural renderings in 2D and 3D using the integrated data, which is easy to retrieve programmatically.

Major growth in air traffic is forcing regulators and traffic management teams within the industry to create and study more efficient flight operations. Mike Ulrey, a member of Boeing's Advanced Air Traffic Management team, is tackling this problem with Mathematica. In this video, Ulrey describes how Mathematica's graphical and visualization capabilities play a crucial role in developing models to analyze and test the safety of new flight operations. "It puts the whole conversation of whether it's safe on a firm quantitative-model basis that enables people to make decisions about whether to go forward," says Ulrey. "They have much better insight and they have confidence in the results."

Judging elements is like choosing a favorite ice cream. Carbon and hydrogen are like vanilla and chocolate, the basis for so many other flavors, but too commonplace to claim as your preferred element. By using the load-on-demand information packages that are readily available in Mathematica, one can better investigate the popularity of the 118 elements available in ElementData by studying how often they occur in the 34,000 chemicals featured in ChemicalData. Of all the elements, hydrogen and carbon unsurprisingly occur most frequently, respectively in 94 and 93 percent of the chemicals. As an organic chemist, my focus has traditionally been on carbon-containing molecules, so I cannot help but view the periodic table from a carbon-centered perspective: how will certain elements affect the behavior of molecules to which they are bonded, and how will they interact with other molecules?

As readers of this blog might know, I have an unhealthy interest in the chemical elements. And Mathematica. The combination means that all my element-related projects are created using almost no tools other than Mathematica. It’s not that I use it because I feel like I should---I certainly use other programs when appropriate (Photoshop, for example). It’s just that Mathematica is the best available tool for many of the things I want to do. Really. My latest project is the website periodictable.com. Let me say right off the bat that this is a fabulous domain name. It took me months of convincing and no small amount of cash to acquire it. It really deserves to host the definitive online periodic table reference website, not just another run-of-the-mill online periodic table, of which there are thousands. Take a quick look at it here.

Sometime rather alarmingly late in the Mathematica 6 release cycle it started to emerge that Stephen had a bunch of people working on an insane idea: including in Version 6 an entirely new set of features never before considered and definitely not on the release plan. Somehow this didn’t surprise anyone. It was to be a system whereby people could access large amounts of useful data by way of simple function calls inside Mathematica, with those calls automatically going off to our servers to get updated information, or even real-time feeds like current stock prices. Needless to say, none of the server- or client-side technology to make this possible existed, but hey, it sounded like a good idea. It turned out to be a very good idea.