I am lucky enough to find time to blog again about the NKS Summer School. Every year is different (see last year’s post), but some things remain the same. Everyone is very active: students doing homework and developing their projects, the instructors helping them and giving lectures and Stephen Wolfram advising students and doing live experiments. As Yoda said, “Do, or do not. There is no try.” Other sayings appropriate to our task: “Never give up, never surrender,” and “If you fall off a cliff, you might as well try to fly.” We are always doing something new at the Summer School, often using the latest features of Mathematica, but there is an intrinsic difference this time. We have more students and more instructors than ever before, which makes this brand of intense science even more intense.

(Two posts from me in short succession. Forgive me. I promise that I won’t frequent this forum more than is bearable—hopefully. But I’ve been asked to do a post about the Mathematica scrapbook that we’ve just made public, so here I am again.) As I said in my last post, June is a special time around Wolfram Research. Given the fact that June 23rd was the 20th anniversary of Mathematica, there’s been more celebration this June than usual. We started talking about the significance of Mathematica’s 20th birthday and what we should do in commemoration some time ago. We decided that one thing we would like do would be to create an online scrapbook.

June is a special time around Wolfram Research. Every year we have a big company picnic to celebrate the anniversary of the release of Mathematica, which occurred June 23, 1988. That’s right, Mathematica turns 20 years old this month.

When you think about it, having a 20th birthday is pretty remarkable for a piece of software. How many other software products do you use now that were around in 1988? More importantly, how many of them are still at the top of their game after so long? We’re pretty proud of the fact that Mathematica’s core design and functionality have stood the test of time.

We thought it would be appropriate to celebrate this anniversary by having a “memory museum” at this year's picnic. Being the de facto company archivist (having once been the corporate librarian and having reached the “relic” status in both raw age and tenure at the company), I took on the role of organizing our displays.

We had a big collage of photos of employees past and present. An awful lot of blood, sweat and tears have gone into the creation of Mathematica over the years and it only seemed right to highlight the people behind the product. Anyway, it’s always fun to note the passage of time through funny hairdos, expanding waistlines and receding hairlines.

We wanted to show how Mathematica has changed over time, too. We came up with a few displays that seemed to show this fairly well. Here’s a graphic we used as a poster to show the disk space used by each of our major versions.

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.