A year ago, we highlighted some of our work for the CBS-Paramount TV series NUMB3RS. In September 2007, we wrote about our enhanced involvement and our launch of The Math behind NUMB3RS. The site presents math highlights and activities for every episode, starting with Season 4. Tonight on CBS, Season 4 reaches a conclusion with the 78th episode—When Worlds Collide—and we’ve got our write-up for it available for your perusal. What happens when the worlds of science and government disagree? History provides numerous examples of this timeless subject. Italy, 212 BC: Archimedes wouldn’t leave his diagrams fast enough for a soldier’s liking and was killed. Spain, 1808: Arago was imprisoned as a spy while measuring the shape of the Earth. Poland, 1939: Kuratowski taught math at an illegal underground university. Tonight’s episode gives a modern version of the clash between state and science.

The Wolfram Functions Site—which just tripled in size—has a rich story. I have spent most of my career deriving integrals and formulas about mathematical functions. When I lived in the Soviet Union, I co-wrote some of the largest books of formulas ever, which contained altogether about 5,000 pages and a total of about 30,000 formulas, and have been reprinted in several languages.

In Mathematica, a core principle is that everything should be scalable. So in my job of creating algorithms for Mathematica I have to make sure that everything I produce is scalable. Last week I decided to test this on one particular example. The problem I chose happens to be a classic. In fact, the very first nontrivial computer program ever written—by Ada Lovelace in 1842—was solving the same problem. The problem is to compute Bernoulli numbers. Bernoulli numbers have a long history, dating back at least to Jakob Bernoulli’s 1713 Ars Conjectandi. Bernoulli’s specific problem was to find formulas for sums like . Before Bernoulli, people had just made tables of results for specific n and m. But in a Mathematica-like way, Bernoulli pointed out that there was an algorithm that could automate this.

A few days ago we built the millionth version of our software products. For the outside world, we recently shipped Mathematica 6.0.2. But internally we’ve now built a million versions of Mathematica and our other products. I’ve been at Wolfram Research for 17 years, and for the past 13 years I’ve been responsible for our automated product build systems. Every night (and sometimes during the day) a large cluster of computers builds new versions of every product we make. Building a single Mathematica is a complex process, involving a host of different computer languages and systems, and a final Mathematica contains more than 10,000 separate files.

Have you ever created a Mathematica notebook (a .nb file) and sent it to a colleague who doesn’t yet have Mathematica? In the past, you’d have to explain about downloading Mathematica Player. This isn’t difficult, but it is an extra step. Wouldn’t it be better if it “just worked”? Well now, on Windows, it does. Thanks to our longstanding relationship with Microsoft, the .nb file format is now officially part of the automatic Windows File Association system. So, whenever any Windows computer with no Wolfram software gets a Mathematica notebook, the operating system automatically takes you to a download link for Mathematica Player. This is also the case for the published notebook files (.nbp) that have been prepared specifically for interactive use in Player. Only the most widespread and useful formats are included in the Windows File Association system, and we’re happy that Microsoft has now extended the system to include the .nb and .nbp formats. It’s a nice reflection of the growing acceptance of these formats as the standard for interactive documents. On the Wolfram Demonstrations Project we automatically point people to Mathematica Player if they need to download it. But if you post a notebook to a site outside of our domain or if you send a notebook in email, we can’t provide automatic, convenient access to Player for others to be able to view it. With .nb and .nbp included in the Windows File Search system, we don’t have to. Now, anyone can use .nb and .nbp files and have confidence that anyone else will be able to read them. It’s another small step in making Mathematica notebooks---and Mathematica---more ubiquitous.