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My Hobby: Hunting for Our Universe

I don’t have much time for hobbies these days, but occasionally I get to indulge a bit. A few days ago I did a videoconference talking about one of my favorite hobbies: hunting for the fundamental laws of physics. Physics was my first field (in fact, I became a card-carrying physicist when I was a […]

Stephen Wolfram
Announcements & Events

And Now for Our Featured Presentation…

It’s been a few weeks since we returned from San Diego, after participating in SIGGRAPH 2007---one of the most prestigious conferences around for the computer graphics crowd. It’s no surprise how popular we’ve become there, considering that so many computer scientists, professional artists and enthusiasts use Mathematica to generate some of their most fascinating graphics. We were a big hit at the 2006 conference, with the then-upcoming Mathematica 6 in our hands. Its graphics and interactivity capabilities were stronger than ever and fit perfectly into the show. Encouraged by that success, we decided to raise the bar this year. But while preparing for the show, we had to answer one daunting question: how could we please an audience so accustomed to the fancy graphics, animations and effects of Hollywood? Well, the answer was obvious. Just do what Mathematica does best: working with mathematical formulas, generating algorithmic content, visualizing real-world data... These things are at the core of the system, and we knew they’d draw a lot of interest at SIGGRAPH.
Yu-Sung Chang, Technical Communication & Strategy Group
Announcements & Events

The Space of All Possible Bridge Shapes

When I hear about something like Wednesday’s bridge collapse, I immediately wonder whether any of the science I’ve worked on can be of any help. Bridge design is one of the classic—almost iconic—successes of traditional mathematical science. And when I first talked about A New Kind of Science, a not uncommon reaction was precisely, “But […]

Stephen Wolfram
Announcements & Events

Taking Control of Mathematica

Who would think you could get so much work done just by twiddling your thumbs? Mathematica 6 brings with it a host of new ways to interact with your output. Want to set up an arbitrary number of parameters and explore their multi-dimensional space? That’s trivial to do with the Manipulate function. However, once you start exploring this space, you immediately realize that your exploration is restricted by the mouse pointer. There’s only one pointer on the screen. It can only interact with one control (slider, checkbox or whatever) at a time. Fortunately, hardware developers realized long ago---long before multi-touch interfaces like Apple’s iPhone, which are in vogue at the moment---that most people have 10 fingers and so in theory can access many more degrees of freedom than the two degrees provided by a typical mouse. Enter the gamepad.
Lou D'Andria, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Announcements & Events

A New Kind of Building?

I recently came back from the NKS 2007 Summer School and the 2007 Wolfram Science conference. This was my third time at the Summer School, after being a student in 2003 and an instructor in 2005. Being an instructor at the NKS Summer School means giving lectures about A New Kind of Science, but the most intense part is supervising student projects. Each Summer School student carries out a project that can be used in a variety of ways---for example, some are published in academic journals, used as the basis of doctoral dissertations or incorporated into professional activity. (A nice feature of this year’s Summer School was that students could now also present their work in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project.) This year I supervised five projects, with topics ranging from social networks to finite state automata. And as an example, I thought I’d write a little bit about the story of NKS 2007 student Maurice Martel’s work.
Fred Meinberg, Special Projects Group
Announcements & Events

Science: Live and in Public

Our 2007 NKS Summer School started about two weeks ago, and one of my roles there was to show a little of how NKS is done. In the past, it would have been pretty unrealistic to show this in any kind of live way. But with computer experiments, and especially with Mathematica, that’s changed. And […]

Stephen Wolfram
Announcements & Events

Always the Right Time for Mathematica…

I was rummaging around on the web the other day and ran across an example of implementing an analog clock, written in MATLAB---a numerical matrix system that’s sometimes compared to the numerics component of Mathematica. I was curious to see how the MATLAB implementation compares to a Mathematica implementation, so I took a few minutes to write its equivalent. Here’s a quick shot of part of the result (download the Mathematica notebook to see the clock run in real time):

The exercise surprised me---not because the Mathematica code is so concise and straightforward, but because of how much I’d have had to learn and how hard I’d have had to think and what volume of code I’d have had to write to do the same thing with MATLAB. After a statement like that in our company blog, I can hear you thinking that the spin doctors are hard at work. But have a look for yourself...
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Announcements & Events

Mathematica 6.0.1 Arrives

It’s now two months since we released Mathematica 6, and I am happy to say that all our years of development and testing seem to be paying off: Mathematica 6 is a robust system that is performing excellently. But even long before Mathematica 6.0.0 was released, we were already working on what would come next. Our development process operates on three basic levels that translate roughly into “X” releases, “X.y” releases and “X.y.z” releases. At any given time, we are making incremental improvements to existing features that will be delivered in the X.y.z releases. We’re also building new features, that will arrive in X.y releases. And we’re working on major new areas of Mathematica functionality that will be delivered in the X releases. Looking at our internal development database, I see that 6.0.1 contains 259 individual code improvements relative to 6.0.0 (as well as a great many documentation and tutorial updates). What are they all? Well, they are distributed throughout the system (as well as in an update to the free Mathematica Player)---reflecting the continuing work of our many software development teams.
Peter Overmann, Director of Software Technology
Announcements & Events

Summer Adventures in the Computational Universe

We’ve just finished the intense first week of our fifth NKS Summer School. Every year I get to spend three weeks playing professor. It’s not the same experience that most academics get, not least because our CEO, Stephen Wolfram is part of it, pushing to get science done, and to get the students to do great projects based on A New Kind of Science. We get applicants for the summer school from all over the world, from all fields and all academic levels. Students are selected on their abilities, interests and enthusiasm. The center of the distribution is graduate students, but we always have some younger people, and some much more experienced people---both from academia and industry. Here is a photo of this year’s class outside of the University of Vermont, our venue for this year’s summer school: We’ve developed a pretty good system for the summer school. There’s a background of lectures, but the core of the summer school experience is for each student to do an original research project. Of course, it helps that NKS is a young and very energetic field, full of exciting problems to be solved.
Todd Rowland, Academic Director, Wolfram Science and Innovation Initiatives
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