The final day of this year's Wolfram Technology Conference was bittersweet. The presentations were outstanding again, but now it's all over. If there is a silver lining, it's that we can't wait to see what everyone will come up with next year!

Another great day at the Wolfram Technology Conference 2010! Wolfram Co-founder Theodore Gray kicked off the morning with his presentation on ebook publishing. Using his own ebook The Elements, he demonstrated how he used Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha to create a publication that is uniquely interactive and has been a runaway success with consumers, ranking #1 in the Apple Store. According to Theo, his company Touch Press is working on several more ebooks already.

Back on May 27, we wrote a remembrance of Martin Gardner. He would have been 96 on October 21, which has prompted the worldwide event, Celebration of Mind. If you look at the event map, you'll see the locations for over 50 events. Some of the 30 event locations in the United States include: Stanford University, to which Martin donated all his mathematical correspondence; MAA headquarters in Washington, DC; Magic Castle, in Los Angeles; and Fort Lauderdale, with an event hosted by James Randi. Here is an ambigram with the event logo, which was designed by Scott Kim. The logo is rotationally symmetric.

The Wolfram Technology Conference 2010 is off to a great start! In his opening keynote, Wolfram Research Founder and CEO Stephen Wolfram unveiled the forthcoming Mathematica 8. Through real-time demonstrations, attendees got to see many of the new features at work, including enhanced image processing capabilities, texture mapping, control systems, wavelet analysis, and much more. Over 500 new functions are being added in Version 8—almost the same as the total amount included in the original Version 1! This year's schedule covers a broad range of topics presented by users and Wolfram developers, including applications for probability and statistics, CUDA and Open CL programming, creating visualizations with Mathematica, and high-performance computation.

Wolfram Research and Wolfram|Alpha hosted the first Wolfram Data Summit in Washington, DC this September. Leaders of the world's primary data repositories attended the summit, exchanging experiences and brainstorming ideas for the future of data collection, management, and dispersion. In his keynote speech, Stephen Wolfram discussed the complex nature of gathering systematic knowledge and data together. He also talked about the creation of Wolfram|Alpha, how Mathematica helps with the challenges of making all data computable, and what we can expect moving forward. The transcript is available below.

SIGGRAPH is one of the most prestigious conferences around for computer graphics professionals. SIGGRAPH 2010 is in Los Angeles, California on July 25–29. We will be there, and if you will be, we hope you'll come visit us. Mathematica has a long history at SIGGRAPH, starting with the Version 1.0 display at the Apple Computer booth in 1988. At past SIGGRAPH conferences, we've showcased many things, including Mathematica features and graphics capabilities. Here’s a short video we played in the background at SIGGRAPH 2009:

As a scientist and a technology CEO, Stephen Wolfram often thinks about the future---both near-term and long-term. On June 12 he gave an unusual keynote talk at the 2010 H+ Summit @ Harvard, titled "Computation and the Future of the Human Condition". Check out the transcript to find Stephen's latest thoughts on our future...

Today (June 23, 2010) would have been Alan Turing's 98th birthday---if he had not died in 1954, at the age of 41. I never met Alan Turing; he died five years before I was born. But somehow I feel I know him well---not least because many of my own intellectual interests have had an almost eerie parallel with his. And by a strange coincidence, Mathematica's "birthday" (June 23, 1988) is aligned with Turing's---so that today is also the celebration of Mathematica's 22nd birthday. I think I first heard about Alan Turing when I was about eleven years old, right around the time I saw my first computer. Through a friend of my parents, I had gotten to know a rather eccentric old classics professor, who, knowing my interest in science, mentioned to me this "bright young chap named Turing" whom he had known during the Second World War. One of the classics professor's eccentricities was that whenever the word "ultra" came up in a Latin text, he would repeat it over and over again, and make comments about remembering it. At the time, I didn't think much of it---though I did remember it. Only years later did I realize that "Ultra" was the codename for the British cryptanalysis effort at Bletchley Park during the war. In a very British way, the classics professor wanted to tell me something about it, without breaking any secrets. And presumably it was at Bletchley Park that he had met Alan Turing. A few years later, I heard scattered mentions of Alan Turing in various British academic circles. I heard that he had done mysterious but important work in breaking German codes during the war. And I heard it claimed that after the war, he had been killed by British Intelligence. At the time, at least some of the British wartime cryptography effort was still secret, including Turing's role in it. I wondered why. So I asked around, and started hearing that perhaps Turing had invented codes that were still being used. I'm not sure where I next encountered Alan Turing. Probably it was when I decided to learn all I could about computer science---and saw all sorts of mentions of "Turing machines”. But I have a distinct memory from around 1979 of going to the library, and finding a little book about Alan Turing written by his mother, Sara Turing. And gradually I built up quite a picture of Alan Turing and his work. And over the 30 years that have followed, I have kept on running into Alan Turing, often in unexpected places.