News, Views & Insights
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.
Today we celebrate a new waypoint on our journey of nearly four decades with the release of Version 14.0 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica. Over the two years since we released Version 13.0 we’ve been steadily delivering the fruits of our research and development in .1 releases every six months. Today we’re aggregating these—and more—into Version 14.0.
Are you planning to start university or college next year? If you’re anything like me, making that next step in your education can be a daunting prospect. Some of you might be worried about being able to keep up with your new classmates, others about maintaining a position at the top of the class—and plenty of you probably fall somewhere in the middle.
Of all mathematical operations, addition is the most basic: It’s what we learn first in school. Historically, it is the most ancient. While the simple task of getting the sum of two numbers is simple, sums of many numbers can easily turn into a challenging numerical problem if the number of summands is very large.
One year ago I released my book The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age. It’s been great to have seen it so well received in the media—featured in Forbes, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and even winning the 2021 Independent Press Award for Education—as well as praised by individuals from all walks of life.
On June 7, the FBI seized 63.7 bitcoin (BTC), approximately $2.3 million USD, from one of the addresses to which DarkSide’s cluster, described in my earlier post, sent their ransom funds. Normally, this should have been inaccessible to anyone without a private key for that address. The FBI apparently managed, however, to obtain one.
Let me tell you a story about how to trace Russian hackers’ cryptocurrency funds using only public knowledge, some educated guesses and the Wolfram Language.
But first, a little background information.It’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this for 35 years, building a taller and taller tower of ideas and technology that allow us to reach ever further. In earlier times we used to release the results of efforts only every few years. But in recent times we’ve started doing incremental (“.1”) releases that deliver our latest R&D achievements—both fully fleshed out, and partly as “coming attractions”—much more frequently.
We released Version 12.2 on December 16, 2020. And today, just five months later, we’re releasing Version 12.3. There are some breakthroughs and major new directions in 12.3. But much of what’s in 12.3 is just about making Wolfram Language and Mathematica better, smoother and more convenient to use. Things are faster. More “But what about ___?” cases are handled. Big frameworks are more completely filled out. And there are lots of new conveniences.
There are also the first pieces of what will become large-scale structures in the future. Early functions—already highly useful in their own right—that will in future releases be pieces of major systemwide frameworks.
As part of Wolfram’s core goal of a unified blockchain interface, Wolfram Blockchain Labs (WBL) works to give developers direct Wolfram Language access to a range of blockchains and decentralized technologies. Today, we’re excited to announce a collaboration with IPFS and Filecoin, some of the core building blocks of Web3 (or the “decentralized” web). In addition to Wolfram Language integration with IPFS and the Filecoin blockchain, this unique collaboration lets developers leverage storage, peer-to-peer networking and other protocols to complement their existing applications or new decentralized applications, all from Wolfram technologies such as our Wolfram Language, the Wolfram Cloud and Wolfram Notebooks.