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Recreational Computation

Computation & Analysis

Most-Viewed People on Wikipedia in 2025 How Catalyst Events Imprint Social Memory

On January 15, 2026, Wikipedia turned 25, and that birthday demonstrates a simple, radical fact: a vast, volunteer-built reference work that stays free to read has become a foundational record of human knowledge and an infrastructure for how the internet answers questions, quietly propping up organic learning, search engines, voice assistants and generative AI. In 2025, one attention-economy tactic got a mainstream label: “rage bait” (the official Oxford Word of the Year 2025)—online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage. It was also a year of conflict, political upheaval and extreme weather, the kind of backdrop that turns public life into a sequence of jolts. And yet when people wanted context, not reaction, they kept choosing the same destination. The Wikimedia Foundation estimates that in 2025, people spent about 2.8 billion hours reading English Wikipedia, and the year’s most-read pages sketch a tight portrait of what pulled us hardest: politics, popular culture and loss.
Vitaliy Kaurov, Director of Engagement
Computation & Analysis

How Long to Boil an Egg? FEM Modeling with Wolfram Language

It’s time to answer the question on any breakfast-lover’s mind: “How long do I boil an egg?” While it seems so simple—place an egg in boiling water and wait—it would be remiss to say a fully hard-boiled egg is the only way to enjoy a delightful protein boost. We can use the finite element method (FEM) to simulate the conditions of an egg in water and find the ideal temperature and duration for the perfect egg by assessing temperature changes within the egg itself. We can then predict how long it takes to reach various consistencies, such as a runny yolk or a crumbly, fully set yolk.

Ricardo López, et al.
Announcements & Events

Announcing the Winners of the 2024 One-Liner Competition

The 2024 Wolfram Technology Conference has ended, and we sent it off with our annual One-Liner Competition! Each year, participants are challenged to show off their Wolfram Language skills in this contest of brevity and creativity by using only 140 or fewer characters to share the most incredible and original output without using 2D typesetting constructs or pulling in linked data.
Bailey Long, Technical Communications Specialist, Outreach & Communications Shadi Ashnai, Manager of Sound & Vision, Algorithms R&D
Education & Academic

Getting Hot and Spicy on the Scoville Scale with Wolfram Language

National Chili Day is February 23 and we’re celebrating the spicy heat that peppers bring to a great bowl of chili by exploring the "ScovilleRating" property in Wolfram Language. The Scoville scale ranks the spiciness (or pungency) of peppers by measuring the amount of the molecule capsaicin in a pepper and assigning it a number rating in Scoville heat units (SHUs). Pharmacist and chemist Wilbur Scoville introduced the “Scoville organoleptic test,” which eventually became the Scoville scale, in 1912. At the time, Mr. Scoville relied on human taste testers willing to do this challenging job. Today, scientists use high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to determine the precise amount of capsaicin in a pepper.
Isabel Skidmore, Food Data Consultant
Current Events & History

Should I Eat That? Food Safety with Wolfram Language

Foodborne illness, or food poisoning, is something many of us have experienced. According to the World Health Organization, almost 1 in 10 people in the world fall ill each year after eating contaminated food. Luckily, by following recommended food safety practices, we can do our best to avoid getting sick.

September is Food Safety Education Month. To highlight the importance of food safety, we have introduced two new properties in Wolfram Language that can help users make smart choices about food storage:

Isabel Skidmore, Food Data Consultant
Current Events & History

Cheers! A Computational Exploration of Alcoholic Beverages with the Wolfram Language

For 10 thousand years, humans have been using fermentation to produce beverages for pleasure, rituals and healing. In ancient Greece, honey was fermented to produce mead. Today, popular sources of beverage fermentation are grains, grapes, berries and rice. The science of fermentation—known as zymology (or zymurgy)—is a fascinating blend of chemistry, biology, history and geography. The Wolfram Language now brings a new dimension to the study of alcoholic beverages through an extensive dataset ready to be explored and analyzed.
Isabel Skidmore, Food Data Consultant
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