News, Views & Insights
Today we’re launching Version 13.3 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica—both available immediately on desktop and cloud. It’s only been 196 days since we released Version 13.2, but there’s a lot that’s new, not least a whole subsystem around LLMs.
We originally invented the concept of “Notebooks” back in 1987, for Version 1.0 of Mathematica. And over the past 36 years, Notebooks have proved to be an incredibly convenient medium in which to do—and publish—work (and indeed, I, for example, have created hundreds of thousands of them). And, yes, eventually the basic concepts of Notebooks […]
Prompts are how one channels an LLM to do something. LLMs in a sense always have lots of “latent capability” (e.g. from their training on billions of webpages). But prompts—in a way that’s still scientifically mysterious—are what let one “engineer” what part of that capability to bring out.
From preparing food to nourish our bodies to finding cures for terminal illnesses, chemistry is a foundational part of our world. As a computational chemist, you may have a lot to learn to master this subject, but fueled by Wolfram’s collection of educational resources, elaborate simulation functions and research projects, you’ll be ready to tackle […]
So far, we mostly think of LLMs as things we interact directly with, say through chat interfaces. But what if we could take LLM functionality and “package it up” so that we can routinely use it as a component inside anything we’re doing? Well, that’s what our new LLMFunction is about.
A few weeks ago, in collaboration with OpenAI, we released the Wolfram plugin for ChatGPT, which lets ChatGPT use Wolfram Language and Wolfram|Alpha as tools, automatically called from within ChatGPT. One can think of this as adding broad “computational superpowers” to ChatGPT, giving access to all the general computational capabilities and computational knowledge in Wolfram […]
With Global Astronomy Month in full swing, it’s exciting to see the merging of Wolfram Language and the world of astronomy in so many different applications from our developers and users—from courses to books to projects on Wolfram Community. No matter where you’re at in your computational astronomy journey, the following resources will encourage you […]
Last year we released Version 13.1 of the Wolfram Language. Here are the updates in astro computation since then, including the latest features in 13.2.
In addition to being able to compute astronomical things, Version 13.2 includes first steps in visualizing astronomical things. There’ll be more on this in subsequent versions. But Version 13.2 already has some powerful capabilities.
As a first example, here’s a part of the sky around Betelgeuse as seen right now from where I am:
Zooming out, one can see more of the sky:
There are lots of options for how things should be rendered. Here we’re seeing a realistic image of the sky, with grid lines superimposed, aligned with the equator of the Earth:
And here we’re seeing a more whimsical interpretation:
Just like for maps of the Earth, projections matter. Here’s a Lambert azimuthal projection of the whole sky:
The blue line shows the orientation of the Earth’s equator, the yellow line shows the plane of the ecliptic (which is basically the plane of the Solar System), and the red line shows the plane of our galaxy (which is where we see the Milky Way).
If we want to know what we actually “see in the sky” we need a stereographic projection (in this case centered on the south direction):
There’s a lot of detail in the astronomical data and computations we have (and even more will be coming soon). So, for example, if we zoom in on Jupiter we can see the positions of its moons (though their disks are too small to be rendered here):
It’s fun to see how this corresponds to Galileo’s original observation of these moons more than 400 years ago. This is from Galileo:
The old typesetting does cause a little trouble:
But the astronomical computation is more timeless. Here are the computed positions of the moons of Jupiter from when Galileo said he saw them, in Padua:
And, yes, the results agree!
By the way, here’s another computation that could be verified soon. This is the time of maximum eclipse for an upcoming solar eclipse:
And here’s what it will look like from a particular location right at that time: