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.
Version 12.1 of the Wolfram Language introduces the long-awaited Video object. The Video object is completely (and only) out-of-core; it can link to an extensive list of video containers with almost any codec. Most importantly, it is bundled with complete stacks for image and audio processing, machine learning and neural nets, statistics and visualization and many more capabilities. This already makes the Wolfram Language a powerful video computation platform, but there are still more features to explore.
After working our way through chemical reactions, solutions and structure and bonding, we close out our step-by-step chemistry series with quantum chemistry. Quantum chemistry is the application of quantum mechanics to atoms and molecules in order to understand their properties.
Have you ever wondered why the periodic table is structured the way it is or why chemical bonds form in the first place? The answers to those questions and many more come from quantum chemistry. Wolfram|Alpha and its step-by-step chemistry offerings won’t make the wave-particle duality any less weird, but they will help you connect chemical properties to the underlying quantum mechanical behavior.
The step-by-step solutions provide stepwise guides that can be viewed one step at a time or all at once while working through a problem. Read on for example problems covering orbital diagrams, frequency and wavelength conversions, and mass-energy equivalence.
We’re back this week with more chemistry, to explore molecular structure and bonding with Wolfram|Alpha and its step-by-step chemistry offerings. Read more on chemical reactions and solutions from previous weeks, and join us next week for our final installment on quantum chemistry!
Structure and bonding in chemistry refer to where the atoms in a molecule are and what holds those atoms together. Molecules are held together by chemical bonds between the atoms comprising the molecule. Understanding the interplay between molecular structure and the electrons involved in bonding is what facilitates the design of new molecules, the control of chemical reactions and a better understanding of the molecules around us.
To master structure- and bonding-related calculations, the step-by-step solutions provide stepwise guides that can be viewed one step at a time or all at once. Read on for example problems covering Lewis structures, oxidation numbers and orbital hybridization.
Mathematica was initially built to be a universal solver of different mathematical tasks for everything from school-level algebraic equations to complicated problems in real scientific projects. During the past 30 years of development, over 250 mathematical functions have been implemented in the system, and in the recent release of Version 12.1 of the Wolfram Language, we’ve added many more, ranging from the elementary Sin function to the advanced Heun functions.
Last week, we kicked off a four-part series on Wolfram|Alpha's step-by-step chemistry offerings with chemical reactions. Future posts will cover chemical structure and bonding along with quantum chemistry. We continue this week with chemical solutions, another foundational component of all chemistry classes.
From the blood in your veins to the oceans covering the planet, solutions are everywhere! Understanding their chemical properties is essential to sustaining life, creating new materials and treating illness. As such, disciplines ranging from biology to material science to the health professions all must be comfortable doing solution-related computations.
To master such calculations, the step-by-step results provide stepwise guides that can be viewed one step at a time or all at once. Read on for example problems covering solute concentration, solution preparation, pKa and colligative properties.
Mathematica 12 has powerful functionality for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) both symbolically and numerically. This article focuses on, among other things, the finite element method (FEM)–based solver for nonlinear PDEs that has been newly implemented in Version 12. After briefly reviewing basic syntax of the Wolfram Language for PDEs, including how to designate Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions, we will delineate how Mathematica 12 finds the solution of a given nonlinear problem with FEM. We then show some examples in physics and chemistry, such as the Gray–Scott model and the time-dependent Navier–Stokes equation. More information can be found in the Wolfram Language tutorial “Finite Element Programming,” on which most of this article is based.
Wolfram Research社の旗艦製品であるMathematicaは，5,000 を超える組み込み関数を有するWolfram Languageを駆動する．数理モデリング，解析の基本となる常・偏微分方程式の分野においては，これらをシンボリックに，あるいは数値的に解くための強力なソルバを搭載している．最近は有限要素法(FEM) を利用した数値的求解機能が大幅に強化され，偏微分方程式(PDE)を任意の領域上で解いたり，固有値・固有関数を求めたりすることが可能となった．ここでは，最新のバージョン12における非線形偏微分方程式のFEMによる求解を中心に，現実的な問題に応用する上での流れを例とともに紹介する．なお，有限要素法を用いて非線形PDEを解くワークフローの詳細，コードはすべて公開されている．MathematicaのWolframドキュメント内で，チュートリアル“FiniteElementProgramming”を参照いただきたい．
How did the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) come up with their multi-phase response to tackle COVID-19? In this post, I investigate how the UK government's original plan against the coronavirus aligns with the four-step computational thinking process. Teachers are welcome to use this post as a free resource.
Please note: where possible, I have taken data from before the DHSC's plan was published.
What is the computational thinking process? Simply put, it is a sequence of four steps that you can take in order to solve a problem. The aim is not just to obtain a solution, but to ensure that the right choices were made, the right tools were used and the right outcomes were achieved along the way. The steps are as follows: you define explicitly the problem you wish to solve, abstract it to a computational form, compute an answer, then interpret the result:
If you’re studying chemistry or are in a discipline requiring chemistry prerequisite courses, then you know how expensive the required textbooks can be. To combat this, the chemical education community has developed open educational resources to provide free chemistry textbooks. However, although free textbooks keep cash in your wallet, they don’t include solution guides for all the homework problems.
Luckily, the Step-by-Step Solutions feature of Wolfram|Alpha has got your back! Whether you’re studying remotely or collaborating via video conferencing, Wolfram|Alpha helps you learn and apply the problem-solving frameworks for chemical word problems. The step-by-step solutions provide stepwise solution guides that can be viewed one step at a time or all at once. The guides not only hone efficient problem solving, but also facilitate digging deeper into concepts that might still be murky.