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5,000 Demonstrations: The Time to Go Interactive Is Now

Today we passed a remarkable milestone: the 5,000th Demonstration was published by the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, the free, interactive resource we created in 2007. This makes the Demonstrations Project the largest collection of open, instructional applets anywhere. And it's also much needed proof that you can create a viable and vibrant technical publishing ecosystem based on interactive applications rather than dead documents---pivotal to moving technical communication into a major new era. What's the significance of this?
Conrad Wolfram
Design & Visualization

Designing the Brick Wall of the Future

I created this design for a brick wall in Mathematica. Constructing it would be tedious and technically demanding work indeed, requiring numerous jigs and repeated measurements, not to mention an unusually skilled mason. Or a robot. A few groups have begun to experiment with the idea of robotically laid brick construction, most notably the Swiss firm Gramazio & Kohler (Facade Gantenbein Winery, Structural Oscillations), and recently, students at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (On the Bri(n)ck). Inspired by these efforts, I set out to investigate the possibilities of robotic brick-wall construction with Mathematica.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Education & Academic

Graduating from Student to Professional

As a fan of cars, I find that even when I am perfectly happy with my vehicle, I check car lots and classifieds and car-dealer ads. This began in college when I had to drive a car that, let me just say, was not a high-performance vehicle. It got me from point A to point B most of the time, but it always needed work and I never knew when it would break down and leave me stranded. I always dreamed of driving a really nice automobile. Working at Wolfram Research, I have many times heard the analogy of Mathematica as a high-performance computational engine. The high-performance phrase takes me back to cars and I wondered, what kind of car would Mathematica be? In my mind, it would clearly be something very fast that has a great engine under the hood but is easy to drive. A car I would've liked to have had in college. Then I thought about how many students have access to Mathematica, which is much like a college student driving a brand-new sports car. It has more than enough power for most applications, and using it can make you look good.
Scott Rauguth, Product, Partnership and Publishing Programs Manager, Partnerships
Announcements & Events

Stephen Wolfram on the Quest for Computable Knowledge

Stephen Wolfram recently received an award for his contributions to computer science. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the speech he gave on that occasion. I want to talk about a big topic here today: the quest for computable knowledge. It's a topic that spans a lot of history, and that I've personally spent a long time working on. I want to talk about the history. I want to talk about my own efforts in this direction. And I want to talk about what I think the future holds.
Wolfram Blog Team
Design & Visualization

Musical Archaeology with Mathematica

While tidying up after my kids once again, I found myself staring at the toy shown below and thinking of a conversation that I had had with an archaeologist Mathematica user a few days before. He had been interested in image processing of aerial photographs, but it occurred to me that image processing would also allow reconstruction of the musical secrets of this precious artifact that I had just uncovered in the remains of a lost toy civilization. Well, this should be fun for 5–10 minutes. The toy is a music box, where you crank the handle to turn the drum that has pins on it to pluck the prongs to the left. Can I discover the tune, without having to move the parts?
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Announcements & Events

Making the Most of Mathematica at Maker Faire

During the last weekend of May, I was one of the representatives for Wolfram Research at Maker Faire at the San Mateo County Expo Center in San Mateo, California. Maker Faire is the largest do-it-yourself (DIY) festival, organized annually by Make Magazine. Participants come from a wide variety of groups involved in projects related to arts, crafts, music, sculpting, robotics, engineering, and so on. The participants are aptly named makers, and their creations are showcased in this two-day family-friendly event. While I don't have the exact figures, the number of people at this faire was around 78,000.
Faisal Whelpley, User Interface Developer, User Interface Group
Announcements & Events

100,000 Posts to MathGroup

The Mathematica mailing list and internet newsgroup comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica (called MathGroup for short) have been in existence for more than twenty years now. In January 2005, we passed the 50,000-message mark. Now, in only a little more than four years, we have added another 50,000. I want to take this opportunity to talk about the history of this effort—how it was started and what is involved in its operation. While it may sound like trials and tribulations, it is actually fun, and I have learned a lot about Mathematica and its uses and users, and about servers, the internet, and general social interactions over the years.
Steven Christensen, Document & Media Systems
Education & Academic

Mathematica and Enthusiastic K–8 Teachers

I just visited Washington, DC, and I find myself returning with a renewed sense of enthusiasm. Did this have something to do with the progression from mild rain to what could be the first sunny, summer days of the year? Or seeing the nation's capitol in person? Partially, yes. But the larger factor was attending the 2009 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Conference, and, you guessed it, talking about Mathematica and mathematics education for several days! I've attended five NCTM conferences over my ten years with Wolfram Research, and I always find the teachers' enthusiasm contagious. They constantly look for new ways to inspire their students, while at the same time building a strong foundation in mathematics. Teachers usually have clever ways to share information and spend countless hours trying new ideas and new presentation styles.
Kelvin Mischo, Enterprise Accounts Manager, Academic Sales
Products

How Do You Do That in Mathematica?

Have you ever wanted a set of straightforward, step-by-step instructions for solving a problem or accomplishing a specific task with Mathematica? Have you ever thought that a Mathematica "quick-reference guide" would be useful? If so, take a look at the "How To" Topics in Version 7. "How tos" are a new type of documentation in Mathematica 7 that provide just the information you need without a lot of detailed background information. This task-oriented approach makes these "How tos" ideal for those getting started with Mathematica. Some students, educators, researchers, and others that would benefit from using Mathematica feel that it would take too long to learn, or is just too complex to use. While this sentiment might seem reasonable given the computational power and breadth of features available in Mathematica, it couldn't be further from the truth.
Nick Gaskill, Technical Documentation Specialist, Technical Communications & Strategy Group
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