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My Wolfram Tech Conference 2016 Highlights

Here are just a handful of things I heard while attending my first Wolfram Technology Conference: "We had a nearly 4-billion-time speedup on this code example." "We've worked together for over 9 years, and now we're finally meeting!" "Coding in the Wolfram Language is like collaborating with 200 or 300 experts." "You can turn financial data into rap music. Instead, how about we turn rap music into financial data?" As a first-timer from the Wolfram Blog Team attending the Technology Conference, I wanted to share with you some of the highlights for me---making new friends, watching Wolfram Language experts code and seeing what the Wolfram family has been up to around the world this past year.
Zach Littrell, Technical Content Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Education & Academic

New Wolfram Language Books

We are constantly surprised by what fascinating applications and topics Wolfram Language experts are writing about, and we're happy to again share with you some of these amazing authors' works. With topics ranging from learning to use the Wolfram Language on a Raspberry Pi to a groundbreaking book with a novel approach to calculations, you are bound to find a publication perfect for your interests.
Zach Littrell, Technical Content Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Announcements & Events

Scientific Bug Hunting in the Cloud: An Unexpected CEO Adventure

The Wolfram Cloud Needs to Be Perfect The Wolfram Cloud is coming out of beta soon (yay!), and right now I’m spending much of my time working to make it as good as possible (and, by the way, it’s getting to be really great!). Mostly I concentrate on defining high-level function and strategy. But I […]

Stephen Wolfram
Education & Academic

Summer Internships

Summer has drawn to a close, and so too have our annual internships. Each year Wolfram welcomes a new group of interns to work on an exciting array of projects ranging all the way from Bell polynomials to food science. It was a season for learning, growth, and making strides across disciplinary and academic divides. The Wolfram interns are an invaluable part of our team, and they couldn't wait to tell us all about their time here. Here are just a few examples of the work that was done.
Jenna Giuffrida, Content Administrator, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Announcements & Events

Q&A with SpinDynamica Creator Malcolm Levitt

Professor Malcolm Levitt is Head of Magnetic Resonance at the University of Southampton and a leader in the field of magnetic resonance research. In the early 2000s, he began programming SpinDynamica---a set of Mathematica packages that run spin dynamical calculations---to explore magnetic resonance concepts and develop experiments. SpinDynamica is an open-source package that Professor Levitt continues to work on as a hobby in his spare time, but the SpinDynamica community also contributes add-ons to bring additional functionality to researchers. Professor Levitt graciously agreed to answer a few of our questions about his work, Mathematica, and SpinDynamica. He's hopeful that as word spreads, others will submit add-ons that enhance the core functionality of SpinDynamica.
Wolfram Blog Team
Education & Academic

Get Hacking with Wolfram Technologies

It probably comes as no surprise that Wolfram has been asked to participate in a number of hackathons recently, including the upcoming HackIllinois. There's a natural fit between our pioneering, agile approach to technology development and the growing hackathon phenomenon, in which coders come together for a short but intensive time---either individually or in teams---to create new and unique software or hardware applications. Last month while at SXSW 2014, Wolfram helped provide support for Slashathon, the first-ever music-focused hackathon. Hosted by Slash from Guns N' Roses, the winning hack will be used to help release Slash's new album. Wolfram provided mentoring for the competition in the form of onsite coding experts and technology access.
Wolfram Blog Team
Best of Blog

Code Length Measured in 14 Languages

Update: See our latest post on How the Wolfram Language Measures Up. I stumbled upon a nice project called Rosetta Code. Their stated aim is "to present solutions to the same task in as many different languages as possible, to demonstrate how languages are similar and different, and to aid a person with a grounding in one approach to a problem in learning another." After amusing myself by contributing a few solutions (Flood filling, Mean angle, and Sum digits of an integer being some of mine), I realized that the data hidden in the site provided an opportunity to quantify a claim that I have often made over the years—that Mathematica code tends to be shorter than equivalent code in other languages. This is due to both its high-level nature and built-in computational knowledge. Here is what I found. Mathematica code is typically less than a third of the length of the same tasks written in other languages, and often much better.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Announcements & Events

How to Make Interactive Apps with CDF

A number of you have written us asking about interface design, Dynamic structures, and general starting tips for creating Wolfram Computable Document Format (CDF) files. I will present three examples of CDF files that will provide some insight into good practices. You should also read the recent Mathematica Q&A Series blog post about delivering CDF to your websites and blogs with the help of the CDF Web Deployment Wizard. This enables users to showcase their Mathematica projects online and share them with the global community. Let's have a look at some features that make CDF great, rising well above other platforms. For a more extensive list, please see the CDF comparison table. We will start with a short program that numerically solves the challenging problem of constrained global optimization by finding the minimum on a limited surface region. Think of finding the lowest point of an area of a mountain range. Dragging the 2D slider on the interface below automatically changes the surface geometry, and the CDF engine quickly recomputes the new minimum. This is reflected in the updated positions of the red dot. Drag and rotate the 3D graphics with the mouse to get a different view. Hold Ctrl while dragging to zoom (Command on a Mac) or hold Shift and drag to pan.
Vitaliy Kaurov, Director of Community Engagement
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