News, Views & Insights
Nearly a year and a half ago—just a few months after ChatGPT burst on the scene—we introduced the first version of our Chat Notebook technology to integrate LLM-based chat into Wolfram Notebooks. For the past year and a half we’ve been building on those foundations. And today I’m excited to be able to announce that we’re releasing the fruits of those efforts: the first version of our Wolfram Notebook Assistant.
Today we celebrate the arrival of the 36th (x.x) version of the Wolfram Language and Mathematica: Version 14.1. We’ve been doing this since 1986: continually inventing new ideas and implementing them in our larger and larger tower of technology. And it’s always very satisfying to be able to deliver our latest achievements to the world.
The 2008 United States presidential election is arguably the most interesting US presidential election in my lifetime.
Already, millions of Americans have registered to vote for the first time in their lives.
Regardless of the outcome, America is going to elect either its first black president or its first female vice president.
America will elect a sitting US senator to the highest office in the land—which, until now, has only occurred twice in US history (Warren Harding and John F. Kennedy were US senators).
Both presidential candidates were born outside of the continental United States.
If elected, John McCain will be the oldest sitting US president upon ascension to the presidency.
Never before in US history has there been such a large disparity in age between the two presidential candidates, either.
It’s also the first election you can analyze using Mathematica 6.Mathematics is a notoriously technical subject that prizes exactingly precise statements. The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is the sum of the squares of the legs, not the sum of their cubes, nor the difference of their squares. Such precision produces the clarity that makes the subject so powerful, but occasionally it comes at the cost of easy understanding. Indeed, more-complicated mathematical statements often sound bewildering upon first reading. Take the following theorem in plane geometry (deep breath...):
Let ABC be a triangle. Let DEF be parallel to AC with D on AB and E on BC. Let FGH be parallel to AB with G on BC and H on AC. Let , , and be the radii of the incircles , , and of the triangles ABC, DBE, EFG and HGC, respectively. If F is outside of ABC, then . Got it? Many theorems of mathematics, including this one, are easier to communicate by picture than by words. Here’s the scenario described in the theorem (images in this post are produced by slightly modified versions of the code for the Demonstration “The Radii of Four Incircles,” which is one of nearly 200 Demonstrations about theorems in plane geometry written by Jay Warendorff for the Wolfram Demonstrations Project):Today is an important anniversary for me and our company. Twenty years ago today—at noon (Pacific Time) on Thursday, June 23, 1988—Mathematica 1.0 was officially launched. Much has changed in the world since then, particularly when it comes to computer technology. But I’m happy to be able to say that Mathematica still seems as modern […]
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.