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.
On December 21, 2020, a visual astronomical spectacle will occur. The planets Jupiter and Saturn will pass so close to each other in the sky that, to the unaided eye, they will be difficult to separate. This is the closest the two planets have come in 397 years; the last time they were this close was July 16, 1623. When Jupiter and Saturn come close to each other in the sky as seen from Earth, this is known as a “great conjunction” and happens about every 20 years or so. But not all great conjunctions are as close as this one. The next great conjunction will be on November 5, 2040, and again on April 10, 2060, but the planets will be a bit over a degree apart, so not as close as the 2020 event. The next comparable event will be on March 15, 2080.
Yet Bigger than Ever Before When we released Version 12.1 in March of this year, I was pleased to be able to say that with its 182 new functions it was the biggest .1 release we’d ever had. But just nine months later, we’ve got an even bigger .1 release! Version 12.2, launching today, has […]
Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram System Modeler trial. Wolfram System Modeler 12.2 was just released, featuring things such as personalization of plots, new model libraries and extended GUI support for advanced modeling. One of the other additions is a new workflow for generating 3D models from 3D shapes. We will use this feature to illustrate some bizarre and counterintuitive physics.
Ever since Thomas Robert Malthus’s book An Essay on the Principle of Population, scientists have sought to determine the limit to the growth of human population due to finite resources. One such resource is groundwater. About 40% of global food production ultimately depends on irrigation and, increasingly, the source of irrigation water is groundwater aquifers. Groundwater irrigation allows farmers to increase crop yields, maintain them in dry spells and overcome temporal mismatches between growing seasons and seasonal rain. In many parts of the world, groundwater withdrawal (or pumping from wells) exceeds recharge, leading to groundwater depletion. In these regions, the “lifespan” of groundwater aquifers is limited, putting a bound on the amount of irrigation per year and the sustainability of groundwater-based agriculture. The goal of this study was to propose a dynamical systems framework capable of explaining past trends in groundwater-based irrigation and providing forecasts of food production.
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.