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.
Connect the dots. It was exciting to draw from number to number until the sudden discovery of a hidden cartoon. That was my inadvertent introduction to graph theory very early in school. Little did I know adults used the same concept to discover hidden patterns to solve problems, such as proving that a single crossing of seven Königsberg bridges to four land masses is not possible, but coloring a map distinctly with four colors is. These problems inspired the methods we know today as graph theory. And in honor of the work of late mathematician and connect-the-dot author Elwyn Berlekamp, we see how sophisticated this "child's play" can be by examining the different styles and themes we can apply to graphs.
The Road to Version 12 Today we’re releasing Version 12 of Wolfram Language (and Mathematica) on desktop platforms, and in the Wolfram Cloud. We released Version 11.0 in August 2016, 11.1 in March 2017, 11.2 in September 2017 and 11.3 in March 2018. It’s a big jump from Version 11.3 to Version 12.0. Altogether there […]
The first global competition was held in 2014 and has been growing massively every year. In 2018 the winning entry came from a five-person team from Boston, after competing against 45,000 people in 65 other cities spread across 5 continents. The participants comprised programmers, web and graphic designers, oceanographers and biologists, mathematicians, engineers and students who all worked tirelessly over the course of two days.
To find out more about the winning entry for Fishackathon in 2018 and how the Wolfram Language has helped make the seas safer, we sat down with Michael Sollami to learn more about him and his team’s solution to that year’s challenge.
Wolfram Research is pleased to announce further collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Foundation as part of supporting makers across the world through education. A collection of 10 Wolfram Language projects has been launched on the foundation’s projects site. These projects range from creating weather dashboards to building machine learning classifiers to using AI for facial recognition. The goal is to put the power of computational intelligence into the hands of anyone who wants access—democratizing the skills that will increasingly be needed to innovate and discover what is possible with modern computation.
By providing easy-to-follow, step-by-step tutorials that result in a finished, functioning piece of software, Wolfram aims to lower the barrier of entry for those who wish to get immediately started programming, building and making. Projects can be completely built on the Raspberry Pi or within a web browser in the Wolfram Cloud.
Version 12 of the Wolfram Language introduces the functions GeometricScene, RandomInstance and FindGeometricConjectures for representing, drawing and reasoning about problems in plane geometry. In particular, abstract scene descriptions can be automatically supplied with coordinate values to produce diagrams satisfying the conditions of the scene. Let’s apply this functionality to some of the articles and problems about geometry appearing in the issues of The American Mathematical Monthly from February and March of 2019.
Over the years, I have been asked many times about my opinions on free and open-source software. Sometimes the questions are driven by comparison to some promising or newly fashionable open-source project, sometimes by comparison to a stagnating open-source project and sometimes by the belief that Wolfram technology would be better if it were open source.
At the risk of provoking the fundamentalist end of the open-source community, I thought I would share some of my views in this blog. While there are counterexamples to most of what I have to say, not every point applies to every project, and I am somewhat glossing over the different kinds of “free” and “open,” I hope I have crystallized some key points.Here is how things will change from the evening of Monday, May 20, to the morning of Tuesday, May 21, of this year.
I approached my friend Frederick Wu and suggested that we should make a physical Wolfram Spikey Coin (not to be confused with a Wolfram Blockchain Token!) for the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Mathematica. Frederick is a long-term Mathematica user and coin collector, and together, we challenged ourselves to design our own commemorative coin for such a special event.
The iconic Spikey is a life-long companion of Mathematica, coined (no pun intended) in 1988 with the release of Version 1. Now, we’ve reached a time in which Wolfram technologies and different 3D printing processes happily marry together to make this project possible!