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, Editorial 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!
February 26, 2019 — Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Every year at the Wolfram Technology Conference, attendees take part in the One-Liner Competition, a contest to see who can do the most astounding things with 128 characters of Wolfram Language code. Wolfram employees are not allowed to compete out of fairness to our conference visitors, but nevertheless every year I get submissions and requests to submit from my colleagues that I have to reject. To provide an outlet for their eagerness to show how cool the software is that they develop, this year we organized the first internal One-Liner Competition.
We awarded first-, second- and third-place prizes as well as six honorable mentions and one dishonorable mention. And the winners are…
February 14, 2019 — Toni Schindler, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Imagine you could import any website to obtain meaningful data for further processing, like creating a diagram, highlighting places on a map or integrating with other data sources. What if you could query data on the web knowing only one simple query language? That’s the vision of the semantic web. The semantic web is based on standards like the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and SPARQL (a query language for RDF). The upcoming release of Version 12 of the Wolfram Language introduces experimental support for interacting with the semantic web: you will be able to Import and Export a variety of RDF data formats as well as query remote SPARQL endpoints and in-memory data using either a query string or a symbolic representation of SPARQL.
January 24, 2019 — Jacob Wells, Technical Specialist, European Sales
Do you select a bottle of wine based more on how fancy the sleeve is than its price point? If so, then you’re like me, and you may be looking to minimize the risk of wishful guesses. This article may provide a little rational weight to your purchasing decisions.
Due to my research using the Wolfram Language, I can now mention the fact that if you are spending less than
January 3, 2019 — Wolfram Blog Team
Mark Greenberg is a retired educator and contributor to the Tech-Based Teaching blog, which explores the intersections between computational thinking, edtech and learning. He recounts his experience adapting old game code using the Wolfram Language and deployment through the Wolfram Cloud.
Chicken Scratch is an academic trivia game that I originally coded about 20 years ago. At the time I was the Academic Decathlon coach of a large urban high school, and I needed a fun way for my students to remember thousands of factoids for the Academic Decathlon competitions. The game turned out to be beneficial to our team, and so popular that other teams asked to buy it from us. I refreshed the questions each year and continued holding Chicken Scratch tournaments at the next two schools I worked in.
November 1, 2018 — Jesse Friedman, Engine Connectivity Engineering
For the third year in a row, the annual Wolfram Technology Conference played host to a new kind of esport—the Livecoding Championship. Expert programmers competed to solve challenges with the Wolfram Language, with the goal of winning the championship tournament belt and exclusive bragging rights.
This year I had the honor of composing the competition questions, in addition to serving as live commentator alongside trusty co-commentator (and Wolfram’s lead communications strategist) Swede White. You can view the entire recorded livestream of the event here—popcorn not included.
October 25, 2018 — Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Images and machine learning were the dominant themes of submissions to the One-Liner Competition held at this year’s Wolfram Technology Conference. The competition challenges attendees to show us the most astounding things they can accomplish with 128 or fewer characters—less than one tweet—of Wolfram Language code. And astound us they did. Read on to see how.
October 11, 2018 — Daniel Lichtblau, Symbolic Algorithms Developer, Algorithms R&D
Between October 1787 and April 1788, a series of essays was published under the pseudonym of “Publius.” Altogether, 77 appeared in four New York City periodicals, and a collection containing these and eight more appeared in book form as The Federalist soon after. As of the twentieth century, these are known collectively as The Federalist Papers. The aim of these essays, in brief, was to explain the proposed Constitution and influence the citizens of the day in favor of ratification thereof. The authors were Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay.
On July 11, 1804, Alexander Hamilton was mortally wounded by Aaron Burr, in a duel beneath the New Jersey Palisades in Weehawken (a town better known in modern times for its tunnels to Manhattan and Alameda). Hamilton died the next day. Soon after, a list he had drafted became public, claiming authorship of more than sixty essays. James Madison publicized his claims to authorship only after his term as president had come to an end, many years after Hamilton’s death. Their lists overlapped, in that essays 49–58 and 62–63 were claimed by both men. Three essays were claimed by each to have been collaborative works, and essays 2–5 and 64 were written by Jay (intervening illness being the cause of the gap). Herein we refer to the 12 claimed by both men as “the disputed essays.”
