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Spreading Mathematica Notebooks One Windows File Association at a Time

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.
Schoeller Porter, Technical Development Specialist, Partnerships
Education & Academic

Demonstrations Pick: Numerical ODE Methods You Might Use for Your Classroom. Or Your Homework.

I would like to point to a recent member of the Wolfram Demonstrations Project: Numerical Methods for Differential Equations. It was submitted a few weeks ago, and I rather liked it because it illustrated several basic numerical approaches to solving a first-order differential equation. Without much fuss this quickly brings one into numerical analysis, approximation methods and other polysyllabic topics important to engineering, math and related fields. As it was making the rounds through our review process, I received one of those phone calls that parents know all too well: the college student emergency homework appeal. I picked up the phone.
Daniel Lichtblau, Symbolic Algorithms Developer, Algorithms R&D
Computation & Analysis

Mapping My Travels with Mathematica

Reading Theo’s blog post about his website reminded me that our excitement about the grand projects that get done in Mathematica often make us forget to talk about all the exciting little things that Mathematica makes possible too. It would be easy to think that Mathematica is only suitable for website production if you have something on the grand scale and high traffic of periodictable.com. So I wanted to write about using Mathematica to make a website that is anything but grand and far from popular... my own. My pages are just an attempt to put my footprint on Google so that I can be found. It mostly consists of a few basic pages about me and my work with Mathematica. So what advantage did I get out of doing it in Mathematica? Well, the first was pretty basic personal practicality---why learn new tools if you don’t have to? I know Mathematica, and I knew it would be faster for me to create it in Mathematica than to find and learn how to use other content management and authoring tools. Once I had coded up a page template in the symbolic XML features of Mathematica, I could create any new page by applying that function to the page content text. The whole lot is automatically written out as HTML and uploaded to the server by Mathematica. But the one unusual part of the content is ONLY practical with Mathematica. My work with Mathematica takes me to a lot of places---giving talks about it, meeting business and technology partners and all kinds of users. I also travel for fun. I wanted to make a definitive list of places that I have been to and to present that visually.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Announcements & Events

Player Pro: Unleashing Mathematica’s Development Potential

I’m excited about Player Pro’s release not only in its own right but because of how it will broaden Mathematica’s scope, adding a pivotal deployment stage to Mathematica’s development workflow. Mathematica has increasingly had many elements of a great development environment, particularly since Mathematica 6. Its versatility, modern programming language, Workbench and automated interface building combined with tremendous computational abilities and symbolic architecture make it uniquely suited for quickly building powerful technical applications of any scale. What about the subsequent deployment to your users? For some time, webMathematica has offered an innovative approach, suiting the range of cases where running off a centralized server and interfacing through a browser is what’s wanted. But server-based deployment is not the best methodology for all scenarios. And up until now, local deployment of Mathematica applications has needed each user to have a full version of Mathematica. Today that changed. Both economical and powerful, Player Pro can be the runtime for almost any Mathematica application, with developers “building in” what is Mathematica’s engine to their applications, or with users equipping themselves independently with the Player Pro runtime. For the first time, developing with Mathematica doesn’t have to mean deploying with Mathematica too. Or, putting it another way, Mathematica was the development environment and the runtime all in one. You’ve always needed Mathematica to run Mathematica-made applications. Now you don’t.
Conrad Wolfram
Products

Decorating Eggs with Mathematica

A week or so ago I made an Easter egg in Mathematica and emailed around a bit to see if I could get other people to try it, too. I consulted with my family, dared readers of my blog to send me Mathematica eggs and mentioned my egg to my friend science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who blogged it on BoingBoing. I also spread the idea around Wolfram Research. As someone with a small collection of ornamental eggs in a glass case in my living room, I am quite pleased with the results. Here’s how it came about: My kids are enthusiastic celebrators of holidays. They want to start decorating for Halloween in August, and decorating for Christmas as soon as the pumpkins and spider webs come down. Last week, I had bought a carton of eggs and a package of egg dye, and kept finding my kindergartner getting out the eggs or the dye without permission. So I’d promised that Thursday, absolutely, we would begin work on eggs. I have a copy of Michael Trott’s The Mathematica GuideBook for Graphics, and on Thursday afternoon, my fifth-grader was flipping through it, looking at the pretty pictures. He saw a picture in it and asked if I could scan in and print out a picture like that on a sticker for him to put on an Easter egg. I decided he had a point there: that one could and should decorate eggs with Mathematica. The example he’d chosen was more elaborate than I was willing to take on in 3D, but I decided to see what I could do while we boiled the eggs. I looked for something to work from and found the Ellipsoid Demonstration on the Wolfram Demonstrations Site. I adapted from that, using the mathematical description of an egg shape from Jürgen Köller’s website as my guide to egginess.
Kathryn Cramer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Computation & Analysis

Friends, Earthlings, ETs—Lend Me Your Sensory Organs!

Yesterday, I put together a Demonstration about the Clarke Belt---the ring of satellites 22,300 miles above the equator. Sir Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 1945 about the future usefulness of geosynchronous orbits, and I wanted to see a picture of them. Coverage of the Pacific seemed spotty. A few hours later, I saw the first news reports about his passing.
Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Editor, Scientific Information Group
Education & Academic

Pi Day

Pi (π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter), its older brother the golden ratio phi (φ) and the much younger e and i are the most famous numbers in mathematics. Pi is everywhere: not only in circles and spheres, but also in the results of all kinds of integrals, sums and products, as well as in number theory and physics. The personality of π is largely unknown: irrational, transcendental, possibly and probably normal. Because of π’s importance, its digits (3.14159265...) have an almost cult following. The first few digits, 3.14, correspond to notation for March 14, which was first celebrated as Pi Day in 1988, in the San Francisco Exploratorium. Wolfram Research has the most π presence on the web, with material at the Wolfram Functions Site (pi page, pi visualizations), MathWorld (pi, circle, sphere) and the Wolfram Demonstrations Project (pi, circle, sphere, disk, wheel), not to mention several built-in Mathematica symbols (Pi, EllipticPi, PrimePi). For NUMB3RS episode 314 (“Takeout”), we helped to fold many hidden π references into the script review and math notes. The writers, director, cast and crew added many more. The opening Black Box, for example: a 3-course meal, 1 restaurant, 4 robberies, 1592 death squad murders. Charlie mentions a circle-circle tangency joke not working, right before a James Bond reference (007---circle, circle, tangent). Below are a few of our π-related Demonstrations. Click any of them to reach an interactive math demonstration. Enjoy!
Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Editor, Scientific Information Group
Announcements & Events

Get Coordinates: New in 6.0.2

Many new features in Mathematica are manifested in new functions with definite names, but some are not so prominent. You might miss one of the new features that I implemented for Mathematica 6.0.2---but it’s really useful, and so I thought I’d write about it here. Let’s say you have a plot, or some other kind of graphic. You see something in the graphic---some special point---and you want to know where that is, what its (x, y) coordinates are. In earlier versions of Mathematica, there were primitive ways to find this out. Now in Mathematica 6.0.2 there’s a nice, clean, general way to do it. Open the Drawing Tools palette (from the Graphics menu, or by typing CTRL-d or CTRL-t). Choose the “Get Coordinates” tool at the upper right.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Products

Adventures in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project

As the project coordinator of the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, I have an inbox that is overflowing with fantastic ideas from Mathematica users and coworkers for how to make the Demonstrations site even more user-friendly and easy to navigate. One of the most exciting new features we’ve implemented recently is the new topics page. In a few easy clicks, users can fine-tune their searches to browse topics ranging from Middle School Mathematics to the Solar System to Natural Forms and everything in between.
Jessica Paris, Demonstrations Project Administration, Research & Development
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