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, Editorial 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, 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.
