I’m looking forward to attending the upcoming International Mathematica Symposium (IMS) in Maastricht, the Netherlands, June 20–24. IMS is an interdisciplinary conference run by Mathematica users, and it covers the wide range of applications of Mathematica. Held every two years (sometimes every year) since 1995, this one is the ninth. It has been located in a variety of places, such as Japan, Australia, Canada and in Europe. I was present at the first IMS in Southampton, England in 1995 and have attended most of them since. I have some fond memories of discussing computational theory under the midnight sun in Rovaniemi, Finland; getting to grips with the Tokyo subway system; explaining details of the Mathematica compiler in Hyde Park, London; and studying mussel shells (while enjoying seafood) in Fremantle, Australia. It’s interesting to see how both Mathematica and IMS have developed and grown in the last thirteen years. What I like about IMS is its focus as a Mathematica user event. This gives it a contrast with the Mathematica technology conferences (these are typically held in Champaign, Illinois, in October). IMS presentations are by users and, since it is an interdisciplinary event, these are often very wide ranging but use Mathematica as a common thread. This uniform language means that material is often much more accessible to people outside the subject matter. It allows mathematicians, engineers, scientists, financiers, economists and others, from education, industry and research, to find a common meeting ground to exchange ideas and techniques. This variety gives attendees a good opportunity to get insight into other subjects, and perhaps learn new methods they can bring to their own work. It also gives them a good opportunity to compare and improve their use of Mathematica. It is also interesting to meet the many different sorts of Mathematica users. I like to see the interesting ways that people apply Mathematica, often finding angles and aspects that we had not completely anticipated. I also like to get feedback on parts of the system that people would like to see improved and where they have trouble. Sometimes, of course, I can help them immediately with my own experience and knowledge, but sometimes improvements are longer term. There are a number of other Mathematica developers at IMS and I’m sure they all find it similarly rewarding. Anyway, if you are interested in increasing your experience of Mathematica and getting involved in the community of users, I strongly urge you to attend the 9th IMS in Maastrict. You can find details on the IMS website. I hope to see you there.

A year ago, we highlighted some of our work for the CBS-Paramount TV series NUMB3RS. In September 2007, we wrote about our enhanced involvement and our launch of The Math behind NUMB3RS. The site presents math highlights and activities for every episode, starting with Season 4. Tonight on CBS, Season 4 reaches a conclusion with the 78th episode—When Worlds Collide—and we’ve got our write-up for it available for your perusal. What happens when the worlds of science and government disagree? History provides numerous examples of this timeless subject. Italy, 212 BC: Archimedes wouldn’t leave his diagrams fast enough for a soldier’s liking and was killed. Spain, 1808: Arago was imprisoned as a spy while measuring the shape of the Earth. Poland, 1939: Kuratowski taught math at an illegal underground university. Tonight’s episode gives a modern version of the clash between state and science.

The Wolfram Functions Site—which just tripled in size—has a rich story. I have spent most of my career deriving integrals and formulas about mathematical functions. When I lived in the Soviet Union, I co-wrote some of the largest books of formulas ever, which contained altogether about 5,000 pages and a total of about 30,000 formulas, and have been reprinted in several languages.

In Mathematica, a core principle is that everything should be scalable. So in my job of creating algorithms for Mathematica I have to make sure that everything I produce is scalable. Last week I decided to test this on one particular example. The problem I chose happens to be a classic. In fact, the very first nontrivial computer program ever written—by Ada Lovelace in 1842—was solving the same problem. The problem is to compute Bernoulli numbers. Bernoulli numbers have a long history, dating back at least to Jakob Bernoulli’s 1713 Ars Conjectandi. Bernoulli’s specific problem was to find formulas for sums like . Before Bernoulli, people had just made tables of results for specific n and m. But in a Mathematica-like way, Bernoulli pointed out that there was an algorithm that could automate this.

A few days ago we built the millionth version of our software products. For the outside world, we recently shipped Mathematica 6.0.2. But internally we’ve now built a million versions of Mathematica and our other products. I’ve been at Wolfram Research for 17 years, and for the past 13 years I’ve been responsible for our automated product build systems. Every night (and sometimes during the day) a large cluster of computers builds new versions of every product we make. Building a single Mathematica is a complex process, involving a host of different computer languages and systems, and a final Mathematica contains more than 10,000 separate files.

Have you ever created a Mathematica notebook (a .nb file) and sent it to a colleague who doesn’t yet have Mathematica? In the past, you’d have to explain about downloading Mathematica Player. This isn’t difficult, but it is an extra step. Wouldn’t it be better if it “just worked”? Well now, on Windows, it does. Thanks to our longstanding relationship with Microsoft, the .nb file format is now officially part of the automatic Windows File Association system. So, whenever any Windows computer with no Wolfram software gets a Mathematica notebook, the operating system automatically takes you to a download link for Mathematica Player. This is also the case for the published notebook files (.nbp) that have been prepared specifically for interactive use in Player. Only the most widespread and useful formats are included in the Windows File Association system, and we’re happy that Microsoft has now extended the system to include the .nb and .nbp formats. It’s a nice reflection of the growing acceptance of these formats as the standard for interactive documents. On the Wolfram Demonstrations Project we automatically point people to Mathematica Player if they need to download it. But if you post a notebook to a site outside of our domain or if you send a notebook in email, we can’t provide automatic, convenient access to Player for others to be able to view it. With .nb and .nbp included in the Windows File Search system, we don’t have to. Now, anyone can use .nb and .nbp files and have confidence that anyone else will be able to read them. It’s another small step in making Mathematica notebooks---and Mathematica---more ubiquitous.

I’m excited about Player Pro’s release not only in its own right but because of how it will broaden Mathematica’s scope, adding a pivotal deployment stage to Mathematica’s development workflow. Mathematica has increasingly had many elements of a great development environment, particularly since Mathematica 6. Its versatility, modern programming language, Workbench and automated interface building combined with tremendous computational abilities and symbolic architecture make it uniquely suited for quickly building powerful technical applications of any scale. What about the subsequent deployment to your users? For some time, webMathematica has offered an innovative approach, suiting the range of cases where running off a centralized server and interfacing through a browser is what’s wanted. But server-based deployment is not the best methodology for all scenarios. And up until now, local deployment of Mathematica applications has needed each user to have a full version of Mathematica. Today that changed. Both economical and powerful, Player Pro can be the runtime for almost any Mathematica application, with developers “building in” what is Mathematica’s engine to their applications, or with users equipping themselves independently with the Player Pro runtime. For the first time, developing with Mathematica doesn’t have to mean deploying with Mathematica too. Or, putting it another way, Mathematica was the development environment and the runtime all in one. You’ve always needed Mathematica to run Mathematica-made applications. Now you don’t.

For years, I’ve been hearing about the NKS Summer School, and about how productive people find the three weeks of “immersion” there. For quite a while, people around Wolfram Research have been asking, “Why can’t we do something similar for Mathematica?” Well, now we are. This year, we’re offering a two-week Advanced Mathematica Summer School. Partly, it’s going to provide an opportunity for people to learn about all those parts of today’s Mathematica technology that they haven’t had a chance to work with yet. But the most important objective of the Summer School is to help people take their projects and implement them in incredible ways with Mathematica. It’s going to be an intense experience. We’re expecting that during the two weeks of the Summer School, every attendee will be able to use the latest Mathematica technologies to create a final product of some kind---that they and their colleagues, students or customers will be able to use for a long time to come. We’re planning a mix of attendees, with varying profiles---senior technologists, researchers, programmers, educators, students and perhaps others we don’t expect.