Last year, we had the first ever Advanced Mathematica Summer School (AMSS). I am pleased to report it was a great success. We saw a large number of applications in all areas and fields, and a select few made it into the program. And we had a real blast doing what we know best—working with Mathematica and using it to make projects happen! We are ready to invite you all to immerse in Mathematica for two weeks this summer during the AMSS 2009. The philosophy of the Summer School is to help people take their projects and implement them in incredible ways with Mathematica. Heading the Technical Services Group has given me the firsthand experience of interacting with our user base and talking about their projects. Since last year's Summer School, I thought on several occasions, "Wow! This would be a really cool Summer School project!"

No, not a vow of silence, but rather, some suggestions about how to move documents from Microsoft Word into Mathematica. A number of us Wolfram Research staffers contributed to our recent Summer School effort by sharing mentoring duties. In my case I worked with Richard Werthamer, a physicist who is publishing a book on the science of casino gambling strategies. His project includes programs verifying his research, and he’s eager to translate them into Mathematica in order to exploit all the new dynamics and plotting features of Version 6. At the same time, he quite naturally wants to move his existing manuscript into Mathematica notebook form to deliver a computable document, combining text and interactive Mathematica content distributable on the Mathematica Player platform. Richard’s situation is pretty common. He prepared his manuscript with MS Word, and a great new feature delivered in Mathematica 6.0.3 allows for the exchange of MathML on the clipboard with MS Word 2007 straight “out of the box”. In other words, after creating a formula in Word using its new native math typesetting system, simply select the formula, copy, then switch to Mathematica to paste into a notebook.

I am lucky enough to find time to blog again about the NKS Summer School. Every year is different (see last year’s post), but some things remain the same. Everyone is very active: students doing homework and developing their projects, the instructors helping them and giving lectures and Stephen Wolfram advising students and doing live experiments. As Yoda said, “Do, or do not. There is no try.” Other sayings appropriate to our task: “Never give up, never surrender,” and “If you fall off a cliff, you might as well try to fly.” We are always doing something new at the Summer School, often using the latest features of Mathematica, but there is an intrinsic difference this time. We have more students and more instructors than ever before, which makes this brand of intense science even more intense.

(Two posts from me in short succession. Forgive me. I promise that I won’t frequent this forum more than is bearable—hopefully. But I’ve been asked to do a post about the Mathematica scrapbook that we’ve just made public, so here I am again.) As I said in my last post, June is a special time around Wolfram Research. Given the fact that June 23rd was the 20th anniversary of Mathematica, there’s been more celebration this June than usual. We started talking about the significance of Mathematica’s 20th birthday and what we should do in commemoration some time ago. We decided that one thing we would like do would be to create an online scrapbook.

June is a special time around Wolfram Research. Every year we have a big company picnic to celebrate the anniversary of the release of Mathematica, which occurred June 23, 1988. That’s right, Mathematica turns 20 years old this month.

When you think about it, having a 20th birthday is pretty remarkable for a piece of software. How many other software products do you use now that were around in 1988? More importantly, how many of them are still at the top of their game after so long? We’re pretty proud of the fact that Mathematica’s core design and functionality have stood the test of time.

We thought it would be appropriate to celebrate this anniversary by having a “memory museum” at this year's picnic. Being the de facto company archivist (having once been the corporate librarian and having reached the “relic” status in both raw age and tenure at the company), I took on the role of organizing our displays.

We had a big collage of photos of employees past and present. An awful lot of blood, sweat and tears have gone into the creation of Mathematica over the years and it only seemed right to highlight the people behind the product. Anyway, it’s always fun to note the passage of time through funny hairdos, expanding waistlines and receding hairlines.

We wanted to show how Mathematica has changed over time, too. We came up with a few displays that seemed to show this fairly well. Here’s a graphic we used as a poster to show the disk space used by each of our major versions.