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Current Events & History

Celebrating Gottfried Leibniz on the 300th Anniversary of His Death

Today is the 300th anniversary of the death of Gottfried Leibniz, a man whose work has had a deep influence on what we do here at Wolfram Research. He was born July 1, 1646, in Leipzig, and died November 14, 1716, in Hanover, which was, at the time, part of the Holy Roman Empire. I associate his name most strongly with my time learning calculus, which he invented in parallel with Isaac Newton. But Leibniz was a polymath, and his ideas and influence were much broader than that. He invented binary numbers, the integral sign and an early form of mechanical calculator.
Kathryn Cramer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Announcements & Events

The 2016 Wolfram One-Liner Competition Winners

Could you fit the code for a fully functional game of Pong into a single tweet? One that gives you more points the more you take your chances in letting the "ball" escape? Philip Maymin did, and took first prize with that submission in the One-Liner Competition held at this year's Wolfram Technology Conference. Participants in the competition submit 128 or fewer tweetable characters of Wolfram Language code to perform the most impressive computation they can dream up. We had a bumper crop of entries this year that showed the surprising power of the Wolfram Language. You might think that after decades of experience creating and developing with the Wolfram Language, we at Wolfram Research would have seen and thought of it all. But every year our conference attendees surprise us. Read on to see the amazing effects you can achieve with a tweet of Wolfram Language code.

Honorable Mention

Amy Friedman: "The Song Titles" (110 characters)

Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Education & Academic

My Wolfram Tech Conference 2016 Highlights

Here are just a handful of things I heard while attending my first Wolfram Technology Conference: "We had a nearly 4-billion-time speedup on this code example." "We've worked together for over 9 years, and now we're finally meeting!" "Coding in the Wolfram Language is like collaborating with 200 or 300 experts." "You can turn financial data into rap music. Instead, how about we turn rap music into financial data?" As a first-timer from the Wolfram Blog Team attending the Technology Conference, I wanted to share with you some of the highlights for me---making new friends, watching Wolfram Language experts code and seeing what the Wolfram family has been up to around the world this past year.
Zach Littrell, Technical Content Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Leading Edge

Less Than Five Lines of Code

Software engineer and longtime Mathematica user Chad Slaughter uses the Wolfram Language to facilitate interdepartmental communication during software development. While most programming languages are designed to do one thing particularly well, developers like Slaughter often find that the Wolfram Language is more versatile: "With traditional C++, in order to develop a program, it's going to take several hundred lines of code to do anything interesting. With Mathematica, I can do something interesting in less than five lines of code."
John Moore, Marketing and Technical Content Team Lead, Technical Communications & Strategy Group
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
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