WOLFRAM

News, Views & Insights

Computation & Analysis

A Thousand Points of Light

The spinthariscope, invented and beautifully named by William Crookes in 1903, is a device for seeing individual atoms. Or at least, seeing the death of individual atoms. A spinthariscope consists of a needle, similar to a watch hand, positioned in front of a zinc sulfide luminous screen, with a magnifying glass focused on the screen. At the end of the needle is a small patch of radioactive material. Originally radium was used; more recently polonium, uranium and americium have been found to be safer.
Theodore Gray, Cofounder, Wolfram Research, Inc.; Founder, Touch Press
Announcements & Events

The Prize Is Won; The Simplest Universal Turing Machine Is Proved

“And although it will no doubt be very difficult to prove, it seems likely that this Turing machine will in the end turn out to be universal.” So I wrote on page 709 of A New Kind of Science (NKS). I had searched the computational universe for the simplest possible universal Turing machine. And I […]

Stephen Wolfram
Products

The Day That Documents and Applications Merged

My announcement last Thursday that you can publish almost any Mathematica notebook so it’s interactive in our free Wolfram Player brings about much more of a change than you might first think. In my Technology Conference talk, I explained how this new Publish for Wolfram Player service removes one of the last hurdles to making new applications as everyday as new documents. And in turn that initiates a new era of communicating technical ideas.
Conrad Wolfram
Education & Academic

Arithmetic Is Hard—To Get Right

I’ve been working on arithmetic in Mathematica for more than 12 years. You might think that’s silly; after all, how hard can arithmetic be? Today we were reminded again about how hard it can be. A nasty little bug in Excel 2007 came to light, whereby the result of computing, for example, 850*77.1 is displayed as 100000: Of course, this works just fine in Mathematica: But why is arithmetic so difficult to get right?
Mark Sofroniou, Kernel Development
Computation & Analysis

Wolfram Research Goes to Hollywood

Every Friday night at 10pm US Eastern Time, around 12 million people tune in to CBS and watch a hit television show called NUMB3RS. It’s the most popular CBS drama on Friday nights. NUMB3RS tracks the crime-solving exploits of an FBI team assisted by a brilliant mathematics professor. The show is about how to use math to solve crimes. If you add up all the bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees awarded in mathematics in a given US academic year, there are only around 20 thousand. And presumably, not every single one of them watches this show. So why are 12 million people tuning in on a regular basis to watch a show about math? Because this show makes math---especially cutting-edge higher mathematics---interesting in a way that no popular television show has done before, much as another show on CBS---CSI: Crime Scene Investigation---led the way in making science both accessible and entertaining to the mass television market. NUMB3RS is therefore the first successful television drama to make advanced mathematics accessible, interesting and entertaining in a dramatic format. So how did that happen? Where does the TV math come from? From the behind-the-scenes brain trust at Wolfram Research.
Marcus Wynne, Public Relations Manager
Announcements & Events

Planning the Wolfram Technology Conference

I think last year’s Wolfram Technology Conference went pretty well. Lots of interesting talks, and I even got to wear fangs and a tie in preparation for Halloween. I did have a couple of misgivings. The days started early and went late, and in some instances I thought certain simultaneous talks in parallel tracks should have been separated. A colleague of mine felt similarly. We both voiced our concerns to the SPTB (Scheduling Powers That Be). Bad idea---now we’re dragged in for scheduling this year’s Technology Conference. (Some Midwesterners might say “drug in.” But I’m from somewhere else.) As the conference takes place October 11-13, this means there has to be some serious scheduling work afoot right now.
Daniel Lichtblau, Symbolic Algorithms Developer, Algorithms R&D
Education & Academic

Analyzing the Fed Rate Cut in Mathematica

The Federal Reserve cut the federal funds rate this week for the first time in four years. And it happens that I am working on a new economics data function for Mathematica---so I wanted to see what typically results after such a reduction in the federal funds rate. The Fed makes much of its data available on the web through the FRED II database. So, all I had to do was point Mathematica's powerful Import function to the site, and I instantly had the data in Mathematica for analysis. It took one line of code. A couple of short Mathematica evaluations later, and I had a list of all the previous occasions when this rate fell 0.5% or more. I immediately noticed that these large drops sometimes come in “runs,” and decided to focus on the large cuts in each such sequence. I found 15 of these which go back to 1954.
Jason Cawley, Chief of Operations, Wolfram Solutions
Show More