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Announcements & Events

Announcing Wolfram SystemModeler 4.3

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Today I am excited to announce SystemModeler 4.3. This release focuses on three key areas: model analytics, collaboration and performance, which I will illustrate in this blog. You can see more on the What's New page, or download a trial to try it yourself. I'll start by talking about our improvements in collaboration. I develop lots of models in SystemModeler, and when I do, I seldom develop them in a vacuum. Either I send a model to my colleagues for them to use, I receive one from them or models get sent back and forth while we work on them together. This is, of course, also true for novice users. A great way to learn how to use SystemModeler---or any product, for that matter---is to look at things other people have done, whether it be a coworker or other users online, and build upon that. Whether you send your models to other people, receive models or send models between your own platforms, we want to make sure that you have everything you need to start using the model, straight out of the box. As an example, I have built a model of an inverted pendulum using the PlanarMechanics library. It has a linear-quadratic regulator built using the Modelica Standard Library, and it also includes components from the ModelPlug library that connect to real-life hardware, such as actuators and sensors on an Arduino board (or any other board following the Firmata protocol).
Patrik Ekenberg, Applications Engineer, Wolfram MathCore
Announcements & Events

Wolfram Data Summit 2016

Wolfram continues to be at the forefront of data science innovation. We invite you to check out the latest here. This past September, we hosted our annual Wolfram Data Summit in Fairfax, Virginia. Over the past seven years, the Data Summit has come to occupy a central place at the nexus of data, computation and business. This high-level gathering of data innovators brings together people from many backgrounds and provides them the opportunity to share their challenges and breakthroughs in analyzing, managing and disseminating data. With its emphasis on cross-pollination, the Wolfram Data Summit has emerged as an exciting place to share insight into the subtle differences and unique challenges presented by data in different domains. New and unexpected points of commonality emerge from these conversations, allowing participants to trade solutions to emergent data problems.
John Moore, Marketing and Technical Content Team Lead, Technical Communications & Strategy Group
Education & Academic

New in the Wolfram Language: Ask

Making web forms should be dead simple. That has been one of our goals at Wolfram Research since the release of the Wolfram Cloud. We've made smart input fields, powered by Wolfram|Alpha technology, that understand almost anything users type. We've designed FormFunction and APIFunction so that you can build forms and APIs with the same readable syntax. And now with the newest version of the Wolfram Language, you can build interactive web forms with dynamic branching and control flow using the Ask family of functions.

Carlo Barbieri, Applied Research Group
Education & Academic

Draw Anything and Win Hackathons with the Wolfram Language

After 36 hours, two math graduate students created Draw Anything, the grand prize--winning, Wolfram Cloud--powered app, at the MHacks V hackathon. We've written about Olivia Walch and Matt Jacobs's winning iOS app before. Now, the pair of prize-winning Wolfram hackers have taken the time to talk with us about how they used the Wolfram Language and fast Fourier transforms to create step-by-step drawing guides for any input image---whether it's a picture of Homer Simpson, a dog, yourself or your future dream car.
Zach Littrell, Technical Content Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Best of Blog

Mersenne Primes and the Lucas–Lehmer Test

Introduction

A Mersenne prime is a prime number of the form Mp = 2p – 1, where the exponent p must also be prime. These primes take their name from the French mathematician and religious scholar Marin Mersenne, who produced a list of primes of this form in the first half of the seventeenth century. It has been known since antiquity that the first four of these, M2 = 3, M3 = 7, M5 = 31 and M7 = 127, are prime.
John McGee, Applications Developer, Wolfram Technology Group
Leading Edge

New in the Wolfram Language: Audio

I have always liked listening to music. In high school, I started wondering how it is that music seems to be so universally pleasing, and how it differs from other kinds of sounds and noises. I started learning to play guitar, and later at the University of Trieste, I learned about acoustics and signal processing. I picked up the guitar in high school, but once I began learning to program, the idea of being able to create and process any sound using a computer was liberating. I didn't need to buy expensive and esoteric gear; I just needed to write some (or a lot!) of code. There are many programming languages that focus on music and sound, but complex operations (such as sampling a number from a special distribution, or the simulation of random processes) often require a lot of effort. That's why the audio capabilities in the Wolfram Language are special: the ability to deal with audio objects is combined with all the knowledge and computational power of the Wolfram Language! First, we needed a brand-new atomic object in the language: the Audio object.
Carlo Giacometti, Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
Announcements & Events

Announcing Wolfram Enterprise Private Cloud

Today I'm pleased to announce Wolfram Enterprise Private Cloud (EPC), which takes the unique benefits of the Wolfram technology stack---ultimate computation, integrated language and deployment---and makes them available in a centralized, private, secure enterprise solution. In essence, EPC enables you to put computation at the heart of your infrastructure and in turn deliver a complete enterprise computation solution for your organization.
Conrad Wolfram
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