Billions of people around the globe tuned into the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China, witnessing the skill and dedication displayed by some of the world's greatest athletes competing at the highest level of sport. The Summer Olympics only happen every four years. Fortunately, there are other olympiads that are held annually—such as the International Science Olympiads (ISO). These academic competitions bring together the most gifted and talented students from over 90 countries. The Olympiads include physics, mathematics, chemistry, informatics, and several other categories. Like the athletes at Beijing, ISO competitors devote hundreds of hours in their home countries to rigorously prepare for their Olympic competition. Together, these elite students are the vanguard of the next generation of global scientific and mathematical talent. Wolfram Research is proud to have sponsored the 50th International Mathematical Olympiad, held this year from July 10–22 in Bremen, Germany. Hundreds of brilliant students will receive complimentary Mathematica for Students licenses for participating in this event.

"The journey is the reward," stated Roger Germundsson, Wolfram Research Director of R&D, while handing out certificates of completion for the Advanced Mathematica Summer School 2009 (AMSS). That was the motto of this year's Summer School, which ended June 19. The two-week journey emphasized hard work, vast amounts of learning, and great accomplishments from one-on-one interactions with top Wolfram Research developers.

During the last weekend of May, I was one of the representatives for Wolfram Research at Maker Faire at the San Mateo County Expo Center in San Mateo, California. Maker Faire is the largest do-it-yourself (DIY) festival, organized annually by Make Magazine. Participants come from a wide variety of groups involved in projects related to arts, crafts, music, sculpting, robotics, engineering, and so on. The participants are aptly named makers, and their creations are showcased in this two-day family-friendly event. While I don't have the exact figures, the number of people at this faire was around 78,000.

During my stay in Champaign, Illinois at Wolfram Research headquarters last summer, I attended the 2008 Advanced Mathematica Summer School. The Summer School gives people from all over the world a chance to present their challenging problems in varied math and science fields and work with others to find solutions using Mathematica. These research topics cover a very wide range of application areas. My personal interest is in numerics, and I had the chance to work on several related projects. While at the Summer School, one of the projects I was involved in was to analytically derive a mechanism to compute the stress distribution in a circular plate with concentrated radial loadings.