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Surfaces and Solids of Revolution: Using Wolfram|Alpha’s “Virtual Potter’s Wheel”

Before today's 3D printing technology allowed us to make objects of virtually any shape, humanity was limited in the kind and precision of shapes we could produce. Driven to overcome these limitations, we gradually invented a series of machines that could create ever-more-complicated types of shapes, culminating (just before the 3D printer) in machines like this multiaxis computer-numerical-controlled (CNC) mill: The first of this series of machines was perhaps the potter's wheel, which allowed us to make precisely round objects of any profile. To me, it still seems a bit magical to watch as potters trace out a curve with their hands, and seeing, as the wheel spins, that curve get copied all the way around the vase:
Peter Barendse, Senior Math Content Developer, Wolfram|Alpha Math Content
Announcements & Events

Track Everything with the Wolfram Data Drop IFTTT Channel!

In March, we launched the Wolfram Data Drop, an open service that makes it easy to accumulate data of any kind, from anywhere—setting it up for immediate computation, visualization, analysis, querying, or other operations. Now we are announcing the release of the Wolfram Data Drop Channel, which lets you track and accumulate data from your everyday apps, devices, and services available in IFTTT wherever and whenever you want. IFTTT—which stands for "if this then that"—is a service that coordinates apps and other services, triggering one to do something when something else happens in another. IFTTT products and apps are organized in Channels of triggers and actions that are used to create personalized recipes and buttons on your mobile devices. A typical recipe could be "If anyone posts a new Instagram photo from Central Park, then add the photo's URL to a databin":
Bernat Espigulé-Pons, OSW Operations
Education & Academic

In Defense of Infinity

The Glencoe Algebra II study materials (p. 10) make an amazing claim (Reddit). This statement is in a math textbook, but it is horrifyingly wrong. A statement like "the letters A--Z cannot be matched up with the numbers 1--26" would be similarly wrong. These two sets of the same size (here, 26) can be matched up as A1, B2, C3, ..., Z26. Can the rational numbers be matched up with the integers? Both are infinite, which allows for the tricks of a technique called Hilbert's hotel, a hotel with infinite numbered rooms that can always make room for one more guest. The Glencoe claim asks if the cardinality of the integers and rationals is the same. Both are , or Aleph-0, which Georg Cantor proved in the 1870s.
Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Editor, Scientific Information Group
Design & Visualization

New in the Wolfram Language: ColorBalance

I've taken pictures numerous times, either with a camera or with my phone, only to find out that the colors were completely off—they had bluish, reddish, or even greenish tints. Before I started working on image and color processing, this was quite mysterious to me. Moreover, I'd always noticed on my cameras a white balance setting that, when played with, produced results very much like my skewed-color photographs. Could it be these two were related? That camera setting is indeed the key to correcting a color cast, and it has been added to the Wolfram Language with the ColorBalance function. Here is a simple example of how it works:
Giulio Alessandrini, Algorithms R&D
Announcements & Events

Wolfram Technology Conference 2015: Pushing the Boundaries of Computation

The Wolfram Technology Conference 2015 is just a few weeks away, and we're excited to demonstrate the latest in cloud computing, interactive deployment, mobile devices, and more as we explore how Wolfram technologies are pushing the boundaries of computation. If you haven't already reserved your spot for this year's conference, there's still time to register. As the conference draws closer, we're putting finishing touches on the event schedule, which will include in-depth presentations, hands-on workshops, "Meet-Ups" for attendees with similar interests, recognition of 2015 Wolfram Innovator Award winners, and lots of networking opportunities. Here are some of the topics we'll be highlighting October 20–22:
Emily Suess, Technical Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Products

Releasing the OPCClassic Library

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Wouldn't it be great if you could easily connect your simulation models to your existing infrastructure? Whether you are working in industries such as oil and gas, industrial energy, or life sciences, connecting to your processes in order to monitor and control them is vital. The OPC (Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control) standard has been developed by industry and the OPC Foundation just for that purpose. OPC is a set of data transfer standards for multi-vendor, multi-platform, secure, and reliable interoperability in industrial automation:
Patrik Ekenberg, Applications Engineer, Wolfram MathCore
Education & Academic

Help Fix Maths Education at the Computer-Based Maths Education Summit

When was the last time you had to solve a quadratic equation by hand? If, like me, you haven't needed that particular skill since high school, then you've probably wondered what all that fuss was about! And it's a good question: why did we spend so much time on those puzzling, formulaic second-degree beasts, using up pencils and erasers like they were going out of fashion, just to find the value of x? The truth is, in the real, working world of 2015, the value of that pesky x will invariably be found by a computer. The sooner education acknowledges this fact, the better. So says Conrad Wolfram, whose Computer-Based Maths (CBM) initiative is using Wolfram technologies to bring computers and coding into mainstream maths curricula around the world.
Richard Asher, Public Relations
Education & Academic

Summer Schools: Wolfram Science and Wolfram Innovation

For three weeks this past July, Wolfram held the annual Wolfram Summer School for over 60 students from around the world. They came to work on projects ranging from aperiodic hexagonal tessellations to computer language grammars to political sentiment microsites. The overarching theme was entrepreneurial science. Participants employed cutting-edge computational tools like Wolfram Programming Cloud, machine learning, and a whole variety of new functions from Version 10.2 of the Wolfram Language.
Todd Rowland, Academic Director, Wolfram Science and Innovation Initiatives
Computation & Analysis

The Winner of the GOP Presidential Debate

A few days ago, Fox News hosted the first presidential primary debate of 2016. The candidates met onstage, vying for support from the GOP electorate. Among the cacophony and crafty messaging, a truly artful winner has emerged: word clouds. The WordCloud function (1 of 5000+ functions) in the Wolfram Language allows anyone to visualize words, sized by their frequency in a text. With a mere line of code, you can create a compelling word cloud graphic from data, text, or URLs. But don't take my word for it; let's make the WordCloud function earn your support.
Jonathan Wallace, Marketing Communications Manager
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