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Education & Academic

Rendering the Structure of the Universe in Your Spare Time

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is an ongoing endeavor to map the sky in great detail, with many different goals. One of the larger objectives is to map the structure of the cosmos by determining the positions of galaxies and their relativistic redshift (basically their distance). Using this data and Mathematica, you can plot the information and reveal the structure of the cosmos. In my spare time, I queried the SDSS website, which is database driven, and in eight separate queries I was able to get all galaxies in the survey out to a redshift of 0.5. According to Wolfram|Alpha, this corresponds to looking back in time 5.02 billion years ago, or a distance of 6.14 billion light years, when the light we're now seeing from the most distant galaxies started its journey here. That's a billion years before our solar system formed. It's taken this long for the light to reach us.
Jeff Bryant, Research Programmer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Leading Edge

Mathematica‘s Role in Flight Operational Safety Analysis

Major growth in air traffic is forcing regulators and traffic management teams within the industry to create and study more efficient flight operations. Mike Ulrey, a member of Boeing's Advanced Air Traffic Management team, is tackling this problem with Mathematica. In this video, Ulrey describes how Mathematica's graphical and visualization capabilities play a crucial role in developing models to analyze and test the safety of new flight operations. "It puts the whole conversation of whether it's safe on a firm quantitative-model basis that enables people to make decisions about whether to go forward," says Ulrey. "They have much better insight and they have confidence in the results."
Wolfram Blog Team
Announcements & Events

Interactive Pythagoras Trees with webMathematica 3

I wanted to build a simple web application for manipulating and exporting Pythagoras trees to make posters and desktop wallpaper, and so I turned to the new features of webMathematica 3. webMathematica is a web application framework released by Wolfram Research. It allows users to write web pages using Mathematica, seamlessly integrating Mathematica code with HTML and JavaScript. webMathematica 3, the new version released on September 15, introduces several new features such as a web version of the popular Manipulate command and a way to evaluate Mathematica code asynchronously, without delaying page loading.
Brenton Bostick, Senior Kernel Developer, Compiler Development
Announcements & Events

webMathematica 3 Is Now Available

We are pleased to announce the release of webMathematica 3 today. Innovative new performance and development features make webMathematica 3 the ultimate tool for adding dynamic content to the web. The new version makes it faster and easier to build websites that allow users to compute and visualize results directly from a web browser. webMathematica 3 is the deployment technology that makes Wolfram|Alpha, the groundbreaking online computational knowledge engine, possible. Wolfram|Alpha visitors can tap into Mathematica's computational and graphics abilities without having Mathematica experience or Mathematica itself.
Wolfram Blog Team
Best of Blog

Twisted Architecture

I didn't set out to tie knots in Norman Foster's Hearst Tower or wrinkle his Gherkin, but I got carried away. It's one of the occupational hazards of working with Mathematica. It started with an innocent experiment in lofting, a technique also known as "skinning" that originated in boat-building. I wanted to explore some three-dimensional forms, and a basic lofting function seemed like a quick ticket to results. I dashed off the function Loft, which takes a stack of three-dimensional contours and covers it with a skin of polygons.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Education & Academic

9–9–9

Number 9, number 9, number 9. The Beatles' "Revolution 9" has the above loop, and their version of Rock Band is being released today. The movie 9 comes out today, too. When a number has a lot of nines in it, like .99999999999999999, many computer systems can run into rounding problems. Fortunately, Mathematica can handle both exact and numeric forms. Here are exact forms of various numbers whose numeric forms have lots of nines.
Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Editor, Scientific Information Group
Design & Visualization

Wolfram Research at SIGGRAPH 2009

Are you a die-hard video gamer? Can you spend hours at a time sacrificing sleep to play your favorite real-time action console game? Or maybe you find yourself captivated by the amazing animation found in movies such as Pixar's latest release, Up. Whatever your form of diversion, have you ever stopped to wonder what makes 3D games so realistic or how Pixar managed to animate thousands of balloons lifting Carl's house? We at Wolfram Research have the inside scoop—it's all about the math and physics.
Doug McClintic, Commercial Account Executive
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