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Mathematica 12 Available on the New Raspberry Pi 4

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.

Jacob Wells, Technical Specialist, European Sales
Education & Academic

Easter Eggs in Plain Sight, Climate Change Challenges and Knitted Images: Wolfram Community Highlights

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!

Chapin Langenheim, Editor & Web Project Coordinator, Project Management
Best of Blog

How I Built a Virtual Piano with the Wolfram Language and the Unity Game Engine

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.

Alec Shedelbower, Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
Computation & Analysis

Peppa Pig, Tracking Meteorite Trajectory and Computational Linguistics: Wolfram Community Highlights

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.
Chapin Langenheim, Editor & Web Project Coordinator, Project Management
Computation & Analysis

3D Printing “Spikey” Commemorative Coins with the Wolfram Language

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!
Shenghui Yang, Developer, Wolfram|Alpha Localization Systems
Computation & Analysis

Computing in 128 Characters: Winners of the 2018 Wolfram Employees One-Liner Competition

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...
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Computation & Analysis

Let’s Tango: Computational Musicology Using Wikidata, MusicBrainz and the Wolfram Language

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.

Toni Schindler, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Computation & Analysis

How I Became a Wine Expert Using the Wolfram Language

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 $40 on a random bottle of wine, you have a less than 0.1% chance of finding a 95+-rated wine. I could also perhaps reel off some flavors and characteristics of wines from Tuscany, for example—cherry, fruit, spice and tannins. My aim is to show you how I took a passing idea of mine and brought it to fruition using the Wolfram Language.

Jacob Wells, Technical Specialist, European Sales
Computation & Analysis

Trivial Pursuits: Applications and Diversions with the Wolfram Language

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.

Wolfram Blog Team
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