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The Wolfram Technology Conference Egg-Bot Challenge Winners

We have a programming competition every year at the Wolfram Technology Conference, which in past years was the Mathematica One-Liner Competition (2010, 2011). This year we held the Egg-Bot Challenge, a change of pace to give attendees a chance to exercise their graphics skills. The idea of the competition was to use Mathematica to generate designs that could be plotted on spheres via Egg-Bots, computer-controlled plotters that draw on eggs, Ping-Pong balls, light bulbs, mini-pumpkins, golf balls... nearly anything spherical or ovoid that is less than four inches in diameter.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Computation & Analysis

Bringing Zombies to Life… Is That an Oxymoron?

I was lucky enough in college to be able to double-major in physics and film/media. One of the coolest connections that formed from these completely opposite subjects was the use of Mathematica. What started out as just a computational tool for all the work in my physics classes turned into an experimental playground for the digital animation I was creating in my film classes. Mathematica is an ideal program to model the true science of motion. And as you'll come to see, it looks complicated, but is actually quite simple! Let's start with understanding some basic human anatomy (or zombie anatomy, since this post is technically about zombies):
Allison Taylor, Public Relations & Marketing Writer, Public Relations
Computation & Analysis

A Response to “Falling with Helium”

Recently the author of xkcd, Randall Munroe, was asked the question of how long it would be necessary for someone to fall in order to jump out of an airplane, fill a large balloon with helium while falling, and land safely. Randall unfortunately ran into some difficulties with completing his calculation, including getting his IP address banned by Wolfram|Alpha. (No worries: we received his request and have already fixed that.)
Jason Martinez, Research Programmer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Computation & Analysis

Even More Formulas… for Everything—From Filled Algebraic Curves to the Twitter Bird, the American Flag, Chocolate Easter Bunnies, and the Superman Solid

This blog post is the continuation of my last two posts (1, 2) about formulas for curves. So far, we have discussed how to make plane curves that are sketches of animals, faces, fictional characters, and more. In this post, we will discuss the constructions of some filled curves (laminae).
Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Best of Blog

Using Formulas… for Everything—From a Complex Analysis Class to Political Cartoons to Music Album Covers

In my last blog post, I discussed how to construct closed-form trigonometric formulas for sketches of people’s faces. Using similar techniques, Wolfram|Alpha has recently added a collection of hundreds of such closed-form curves for faces, shapes, animals, logos and signatures. In today’s post, I want to show some of the entertaining things one can do with these parametrized curves. Although these are just simple curves, a large variety of fun images (and animations) can be constructed from them. These can then be used, for example, in political cartoons, talk shows, posters, music album covers or just to spice up an advanced calculus or first-year theoretical mechanics class. I will first discuss the fun applications, and then the more mathematical ones.
Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Computation & Analysis

Making Formulas… for Everything—From Pi to the Pink Panther to Sir Isaac Newton

Here at Wolfram Research and at Wolfram|Alpha we love mathematics and computations. Our favorite topics are algorithms, followed by formulas and equations. For instance, Mathematica can calculate millions of (more precisely, for all practical purposes, infinitely many) integrals, and Wolfram|Alpha knows hundreds of thousands of mathematical formulas (from Euler's formula and BBP-type formulas for pi to complicated definite integrals containing sin(x)) and plenty of physics formulas (e.g from Poiseuille's law to the classical mechanics solutions of a point particle in a rectangle to the inverse-distance potential in 4D in hyperspherical coordinates), as well as lesser-known formulas, such as formulas for the shaking frequency of a wet dog, the maximal height of a sandcastle, or the cooking time of a turkey. Recently we added formulas for a variety of shapes and forms, and the Wolfram|Alpha Blog showed some examples of shapes that were represented through mathematical equations and inequalities. These included fictional character curves:
Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Computation & Analysis

Exploding Art: da Vinci Code of Another Sort

What does programming have to do with a passion for the arts and history? Well, if you turn education into a game and add a bit of coding, then you can easily end up in the realm of a modern paradigm called, fancily, "gamification." Though gamification is a very wide concept based on game use in non-game contexts (design, security, marketing, even protein folding, you name it), at heart it is very simple: play, have fun, and get things done. I may have oversimplified things here for the sake of a rhyme, but if you bear with my lengthy prelude, we may just see a simple case of turning passion into software. My obsession with diagrams and simple line drawings began almost unnoticeably in the winter of 2003 in New York City after attending an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: "the first comprehensive survey of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings ever presented in America." You may think it'd be a drag---crowds marching very slowly in a single long line coiling through the exhibition hallways. But perception of time transforms when you stare at 500-year-old craft. I think it was then that it started to dawn on me what special value a first sketch has. A first act when an idea, something very subjective, evasive, living solely inside one's mind, materializes as a solid reality, now perceivable by another human being. Imagine it happened ages ago. Wouldn't you be curious what was going on at that moment in time, what got frozen in this piece of craft in front of you?
Vitaliy Kaurov, Director of Community Engagement
Computation & Analysis

Behind the Scenes at the National Museum of Mathematics Meta-Logo

The National Museum of Mathematics, which opened in Manhattan in December, doesn't have a logo. It has an infinite family of logos. And the logos the museum uses for official business are not created by design professionals. They're designed by the museum's visitors. The logo is itself an exhibit in the museum. The museum's unique meta-logo was conceived and implemented at Wolfram Research. When I say "implemented," I don't mean just "calculated" or "rendered," but actually "programmed." This is a logo that requires an implementation.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Education & Academic

Centennial of Markov Chains

On January 23, 1913 of the Julian calendar, Andrey A. Markov presented for the Royal Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg his analysis of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. He found that the sequence of consonants and vowels in the text could be well described as a random sequence, where the likely category of a letter depended only on the category of the previous or previous two letters. At the time, the Russian Empire was using the Julian calendar. The 100th anniversary of the celebrated presentation is actually February 5, 2013, in the now used Gregorian calendar. To perform his analysis, Markov invented what are now known as "Markov chains," which can be represented as probabilistic state diagrams where the transitions between states are labeled with the probabilities of their occurrences.
Oleksandr Pavlyk, Senior Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
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