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Launching Version 12.3 of Wolfram Language & Mathematica

Look What We Made in Five Months!

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.

Announcements & Events

Using IPFS, Filecoin and the Wolfram Language to Build a Unified Decentralized Services Interface

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.

Education & Academic

Wolfram Neural Networks Boot Camp Recap: Dog vs. Butterfly Optical Illusion Showdown

Neural networks are increasingly a part of society and are used in many aspects of life, especially e-commerce and social media. I recently had the opportunity to attend the Wolfram Neural Networks Boot Camp with developers and researchers who design and utilize Wolfram Language neural net resources. During the boot camp, participants received a crash course on using neural nets in the Wolfram Language.
Education & Academic

Graduate to the Wolfram Early Professionals Program

Each year, 73 billion students use Mathematica and the Wolfram Language at their universities. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but as the person leading the Wolfram sales team, I see my group fielding questions from tons of students on their options for using Mathematica after they graduate. So perhaps it sometimes just feels like 73 billion.

And that’s a good thing—we’re always excited to help these brilliant young minds use Mathematica and the Wolfram Language to do basic repetitive tasks, from solving integrals or graphing trig functions in their undergraduate work to visualizing complex sets of data or building an AI system for their graduate-level research.

Announcements & Events

Introducing Wolfram Application Server

Wolfram Application Server is a new platform developed by Wolfram Research enabling customers to deploy Wolfram Language–powered APIs and webpages into a scalable, highly available enterprise cluster.

Wolfram Application Server lets you:

manage data exchange in your deployments with a robust external services framework. create applications using the Wolfram Natural Language Understanding (NLU) System, the key semantic interpretation technology behind Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram Language. generate content based on time and location, assign custom endpoints and integrate curated content from the Wolfram Knowledgebase.

We have designed Wolfram Application Server for customers who for regulatory, security or business reasons may not wish to deploy onto the Wolfram Cloud but prefer to host their Wolfram Language applications on clusters they control.

Announcements & Events

The Wolfram Physics Project:
A One-Year Update

When we launched the Wolfram Physics Project a year ago today, I was fairly certain that—to my great surprise—we’d finally found a path to a truly fundamental theory of physics, and it was beautiful. A year later it’s looking even better. We’ve been steadily understanding more and more about the structure and implications of our […]

Announcements & Events

Static Analysis Tools in the Wolfram Language

Catching Common Problems

Finding bugs and fixing them is more than a passion of mine—it’s a compulsion. Several years ago, as a QA developer, I created the MUnit unit testing framework for the Wolfram Language, which is a framework for authoring and running unit tests in the language. Since then, I’ve created more tools to help developers write better Wolfram Language code while seamlessly checking for bugs in the process.

Writing good tests requires a lot of knowledge and a great deal of time. Since we need to be able to test and resolve bugs as quickly as possible in order to release new features on schedule, we turn to static analysis to be able to do so.

Current Events & History

Is Your Function Continuous? Squaring Away the New Function Properties in the Wolfram Language

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The Wolfram Language has several hundred built-in functions, ranging from sine to Heun. As a user, you can extend this collection in infinitely many ways by applying arithmetic operations and function composition. This could lead you to defining expressions of bewildering complexity, such as the following:

&#10005 f = SinhIntegral[ LogisticSigmoid[ ScorerHi[Tanh[AiryAi[HermiteH[-(1/2), x] - x + 1]]]]];
You may then ask, “Is continuous?” or “Can be written as a composition of an increasing function with another function?” The powerful new tools for studying function properties in Version 12.2 provide quick answers to such questions—opening the doors for applying a network of theorems and ideas that have been developed by mathematicians during the last few centuries.
Current Events & History

The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher

In 2020, Melbourne, Australia, had a 112-day lockdown of the entire city to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The wearing of masks was mandatory and we were limited to one hour a day of outside activity. Otherwise, we were stuck in our homes. This gave me lots of time to look into interesting problems I’d been putting off for years.

I was inspired by a YouTube video by David Oranchak, which looked at the Zodiac Killer’s 340-character cipher (Z340), which is pictured below. This cipher is considered one of the holy grails of cryptography, as at the time the cipher had resisted attacks for 50 years, so any attempts to find a solution were truly a moonshot.