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.
This year has been Wolfram Media’s most productive yet, with five new titles and another published in partnership. While 2020's state and global shutdowns created unprecedented logistical challenges for the Wolfram Media team, I'm really proud of how we pulled together this year's list, with several more books already in production for release next year.
In early October, by what at this point can only be a time-honored tradition, the Livecoding Championship returned in its fifth annual iteration as a special event during the 2020 Wolfram Technology Conference. As in preceding years, the championship offered top Wolfram Language programmers a chance to show off their knowledge, agility, typing speed and documentation-reading skills to an unfailingly adoring audience.
Follow along with this post by watching this recorded video of the 2020 Livecoding Championship livestream!
In medical fields like cardiology, the Wolfram Language continues to help researchers make discoveries and predictions. I recently coauthored a study that uses the machine learning functionality of the Wolfram Language to predict risks of deaths due to heart failure. In it, we aimed to build a classifier that is capable of distinguishing the probabilities of cardiac death caused by end-stage heart failure (HFD) and severe arrhythmic events/sudden death (ArE). What follows is a summary of the paper we published earlier this year.
Students are spending countless hours online for classes this year, pushing educators to offer more engaging and worthwhile virtual content. We debuted Wolfram Daily Study Groups in early April with this in mind, and the results have far surpassed our expectations! Throughout this ongoing program, we’ve been able to keep students, professionals and lifelong learners engaged and connected in an enriching online community. With several Study Groups completed, and more in the works, we thought we’d share some of our successes so far.
Halloween this year had a surprise up its sleeve. In rare celestial serendipity, the night of costume metamorphosis also featured a full moon, which helped to conjure the spooky mood. Because it might have been the first and last full-moon Halloween that some people witnessed in their lifetime (cue ominous music), I think it was significantly underrated. Moreover, it was the day of a blue moon (the second full moon within a month), but that is not a surprise, as any Halloween’s full moon is always a blue moon. The Moon’s color did not change, though, at least for those away from the smoke of volcanos and forest fires that are capable of turning it visibly blue. To appreciate the science and uniqueness of a full moon this Halloween, I built this visualization that tells the whole story in one picture. This is how I did it.
The pandemic has postponed or canceled a lot of things this year, but luckily learning isn’t one of them. Check out these picks for new Wolfram Language books that will help you explore new software, calculus, engineering and more from the comfort of home.
Our annual Wolfram Technology Conference took place October 6–9, and along with it the 10th annual Wolfram Innovator Award Ceremony. This year, Stephen Wolfram recognized 13 outstanding individuals from around the globe for their significant work using the Wolfram Language across fields and disciplines.
Although this year’s Wolfram Technology Conference was virtual, that didn’t stop us from running the ninth annual One-Liner Competition, where attendees vie to produce the most amazing results they can with 128 or fewer characters of Wolfram Language code. Here are the winners, including an audio game, a hands-free 3D viewer and code that makes up countries.
Blockchain was integrated into the Wolfram Language in 2018 with the release of Version 11.3, featuring a set of functions that is constantly improved and expanded upon by our team. Currently supporting a seamless connection to the Bitcoin, Ethereum, ARK and bloxberg mainnets, testnets and devnets, Wolfram introduced to the distributed ledger technology (DLT) space its philosophy of injecting computational intelligence everywhere through Wolfram Blockchain Labs, with the mission of enabling blockchain-based commerce and business model innovation.