December 23, 2019 — Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
For many of us, programming represents leisure time just as much as work. Here at Wolfram, we have an incredibly creative group with a wide variety of hobbies, on the screen and off—including textile arts like cross-stitch. So when my colleague Jay suggested that I create a cross-stitch program using the Wolfram Language, I replied with “Challenge accepted!” Jay was looking for a simple way to generate a cross-stitch pattern from a photograph—or really any image—with the colors corresponding to the DMC thread ID numbers. We both knew that the image-processing capabilities of the Wolfram Language would make this an easy task, but incorporating the DMC thread catalog seemed a more interesting challenge. Armed with both computer and (virtual) thread, I set out on my quest to create the perfect cross-stitch pattern generator.
December 5, 2019 — Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
This year’s Wolfram Technology Conference was host to the eighth annual One-Liner Competition, an event where attendees show us the most astounding things they can accomplish with 128 or fewer characters of Wolfram Language code. Submissions included games, card tricks and yoga exercises, all implemented with less than one tweet’s worth of the Wolfram Language.
November 13, 2019 — Jesse Friedman, Software Engineer, Engine Connectivity Engineering
Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of returning as a commentator for the fourth annual Livecoding Championship, a special event held during the 2019 Wolfram Technology Conference. We had such an incredible turnout this year, with 27 total participants and 14 earning at least one point! Conference attendees and Wolfram staff competed for the title of Livecoding Champion, with seven questions (plus one tiebreaker!) challenging their speed, agility and knowledge of the Wolfram Language. It was a high-spirited battle for first place, and while I had prepared “answer key” solutions in advance, I always look forward to the creativity and cleverness that competitors demonstrate in their wide range of approaches to each question.
By popular request, in addition to revisiting the questions, I’ll walk you through how competitors reached their solutions and earned their points, as a kind of “study guide” for next year’s aspiring champions. So hold on to your keyboards—we’re going in!
October 28, 2019 — Sylvia Haas, Social Media Specialist, Public Relations
Today marks the start of our annual Wolfram Technology Conference. We’re looking forward to hearing about the latest innovations in computation from our Wolfram technology users! The conference is a great way to network with other users and find out what’s new at Wolfram and in our community. If you aren’t attending this year, you can still connect with the conference through our broadcast events.
October 1, 2019 — Stephen Wolfram
The Story of Rule 30
How can something that simple produce something that complex? It’s been nearly 40 years since I first saw rule 30—but it still amazes me. Long ago it became my personal all-time favorite science discovery, and over the years it’s changed my whole worldview and led me to all sorts of science, technology, philosophy and more.
But even after all these years, there are still many basic things we don’t know about rule 30. And I’ve decided that it’s now time to do what I can to stimulate the process of finding more of them out. So as of today, I am offering $30,000 in prizes for the answers to three basic questions about rule 30.
July 11, 2019 — Jacob Wells, Technical Specialist, European Sales
With the recent announcement of the all-new Raspberry Pi 4, we are proud to announce that our latest development, Version 12 of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language, is available for you to use when you get your hands on the Raspberry Pi 4.
Mathematica 12 is a major milestone in our journey that has spanned 30 years, significantly extending the reach of Mathematica and introducing a whole array of new features, including significant expansion of numerical, mathematic and geometric computation, audio and signal processing, text and language processing, machine learning, neural networks and much more. Version 12 gives Mathematica users new levels of power and effectiveness. With thousands of different updates across the system, and 278 new functions in 103 areas, there is so much to explore.
June 25, 2019 — Chapin Langenheim, Editor & Web Project Coordinator, Project Management
Wolfram Community is our favorite, continually growing forum to share and show support for projects using the Wolfram Language, connect with other Mathematica aficionados and find solutions for coding questions. It’s also a great platform for sharing computational innovations that can benefit your local community—or beyond. We’ve collected some of the exciting ways Wolfram Community members have been giving back through Wolfram technology—check them out!
June 6, 2019 — Alec Shedelbower, Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
You know what’s harder than learning the piano? Learning the piano without a piano, and without any knowledge of music theory. For me, acquiring a real piano was out of the question; I had neither the funds nor space in my small college apartment. So naturally, it looked like I would have to build one myself—digitally, of course. And luckily, I had Mathematica, Unity and a few hours to spare. Because working in Unity is incredibly quick and efficient with the Wolfram Language and UnityLink, I’ve created a playable section of piano, and even learned a bit of music theory in the process.
Peppa Pig, Tracking Meteorite Trajectory and Computational Linguistics: Wolfram Community Highlights
March 21, 2019 — Chapin Langenheim, Editor & Web Project Coordinator, Project Management
Over the past 16 weeks, Wolfram Community has gained over 1,000 new members—surpassing 21,000 members total! We’ve also seen more activity, with 800,000 pageviews and 160,000 new readers in that time period. We enjoy seeing the interesting and unique projects Wolfram Language users come up with and are excited to share some of the posts that make Wolfram Community a favorite platform for sharing, socializing and networking.
March 14, 2019 — Shenghui Yang, Developer, Wolfram|Alpha Localization Systems
I approached my friend Frederick Wu and suggested that we should make a physical Wolfram Spikey Coin (not to be confused with a Wolfram Blockchain Token!) for the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Mathematica. Frederick is a long-term Mathematica user and coin collector, and together, we challenged ourselves to design our own commemorative coin for such a special event.
The iconic Spikey is a life-long companion of Mathematica, coined (no pun intended) in 1988 with the release of Version 1. Now, we’ve reached a time in which Wolfram technologies and different 3D printing processes happily marry together to make this project possible!
