Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

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.
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.
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.
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.
Education & Academic

Could Mathematica Help Prevent Future Housing Crises?

Fannie Mae financial economist Bernard Gress attributes part of the current economic crisis to reliance on outdated statistical models. He's taking a fresh approach to the problem---using Mathematica to create a genetic algorithm system for predicting economic data related to housing prices. In this video, he describes the advantages of developing new mortgage forecasting models with Mathematica.
Announcements & Events

International Mathematica User Conference 2009

Do you want to meet other Mathematica users? Are you excited to learn more about Wolfram|Alpha? We are pleased to announce that this year's International Mathematica User Conference will be held October 22–24 in Champaign, Illinois, USA. The annual conference is a great place to talk to Mathematica developers and enthusiasts about different projects and ideas using Wolfram Research products.
Announcements & Events

Sponsoring the Olympiads

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.
Products

The Celebration Continues: 5,000+ Demonstrations

Last week we proudly celebrated the milestone of 5,000 Demonstrations. As each one is a separate program, this represents a huge collaborative software development. And now, every Demonstration has its preview animation available on YouTube. Each has a unique soundtrack created with variations on a custom WolframTones selection. Some facts and figures: over the last year, there have been nearly 14 million visits to all Demonstrations pages, with 3.5 million unique visitors to the main site. As stated in the previous blog post, Demonstrations have been viewed over 6 million times. Over 1 million notebooks have been downloaded using the Mathematica Player and over half a million source notebooks have been downloaded. Here are the top Demonstration topics: