WOLFRAM

The Wolfram|Alpha Blog is now part of the Wolfram Blog. Please update your subscriptions and follow us here.

News, Views & Insights

Products

Q&A with Michael Tiller, Author of Modelica by Example

Modelica is the object-oriented modeling language used in SystemModeler to model components and systems. When I first learned Modelica, I read all books available about the language (there are not that many!) and found the book Introduction to Physical Modeling with Modelica by Michael Tiller to be the best out there. In 2012, when Michael started a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of a Creative Commons licensed book about Modelica, I was the first person to back it, and Wolfram Research became one of the gold sponsors of the book. A new key feature in SystemModeler 4.0 is the full Modelica by Example book included in the product. This makes it much easier to get started learning Modelica. I had the opportunity to ask Michael a couple of questions about the new book and Modelica.
Johan Rhodin, Kernel Developer, Mathematica Algorithm R&D
Products

Sweet Tweets: Valentine’s Day Tweet-a-Program Challenge

As Valentine's Day approaches, Wolfram is holding a Tweet-a-Program challenge. To help us celebrate the romantic holiday, tweet us your best Valentine-themed Wolfram Language code. As with our other challenges, we'll pin, retweet, and share your submissions with our followers—and we'll use the Wolfram Language to randomly select winning tweets, along with one or two of our favorites. If you’re a lucky winner, we’ll send you a Wolfram T-shirt! Submissions aren't limited to heart-themed programs, but check out these examples if you need a little inspiration:
Emily Suess, Technical Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Products

MHacks V’s Winning Hack Uses Wolfram Programming Cloud

Draw Anything, an iOS app designed and created by Olivia Walch and Matt Jacobs, was the winning hack at the recent MHacks V. Utilizing the power of Wolfram Programming Cloud, the two Draw Anything hackers came out on top after a fierce competition between more than 250 talented teams, made up of 1,200 hackers representing over 100 universities. Students from around the world came to learn, network, and "spend 36 hours building anything they can imagine."
Wolfram Blog Team
Education & Academic

Jacob Bernoulli’s Legacy in Mathematica

January 16, 2015, marks the 360th birthday anniversary of Jacob Bernoulli (also James, or Jacques). Jacob Bernoulli was the first mathematician in the Bernoulli family, which produced many notable mathematicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jacob Bernoulli's mathematical legacy is rich. He introduced Bernoulli numbers, solved the Bernoulli differential equation, studied the Bernoulli trials process, proved the Bernoulli inequality, discovered the number e, and demonstrated the weak law of large numbers (Bernoulli's theorem).
Oleksandr Pavlyk, Senior Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
Products

A Mathematical Modeling Approach to Monitoring Liver Function in Drug Trials

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Mathematical modeling is not just used for understanding and designing new products and drugs; modeling can also be used in health care, and in the future, your doctor might examine your liver with a mathematical model just like the one researchers at AstraZeneca have developed. The liver is a vital organ, and currently there isn't really a way to compensate for loss of liver function in the long term. The liver performs a wide range of functions, including detoxification, protein synthesis, and secretion of compounds necessary for digestion, just to mention a few. In the US and Europe, up to 15 % of all acute liver failure cases are due to drug-induced liver injury, and the risk of injuring the liver is of major concern in testing new drug candidates. So in order to safely monitor the impact of a new drug candidate on the liver, researchers at the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca have recently published a method for evaluating liver function that combines magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and mathematical modeling---potentially allowing for early identification of any reduced liver function in humans. Last year, Wolfram MathCore and AstraZeneca worked together on a project where we investigated some modifications of AstraZeneca's modeling framework. We presented the promising results at the ISMRM-ESMRMB Joint Annual Meeting, which is the major international magnetic resonance conference. In this blog post, I'll show how the Wolfram Language was used to calculate liver function and how more complex models of liver function can be implemented in Wolfram SystemModeler.
Mikael Forsgren, Senior Applications Engineer, SystemModeler
Education & Academic

Serial Interface Control of Astronomical Telescopes

As an amateur astronomer, I'm always interested in ways to use Mathematica in my hobby. In earlier blog posts, I've written about how Mathematica can be used to process and improve images taken of planets and nebulae. However, I'd like to be able to control my astronomical hardware directly with the Wolfram Language. In particular, I've been curious about using the Wolfram Language as a way to drive my telescope mount, for the purpose of automating an observing session. There is precedent for this because some amateurs use their computerized telescopes to hunt down transient phenomena like supernovas. Software already exists for performing many of the tasks that astronomers engage in—locating objects, managing data, and performing image processing. However, it would be quite cool to automate all the different tasks associated with an observing session from one notebook. Mathematica is highly useful because it can perform many of these operations in a unified manner. For example, Mathematica incorporates a vast amount of useful astronomical data, including the celestial coordinates of hundreds of thousands of stars, nebula, galaxies, asteroids, and planets. In addition to this, Mathematica's image processing and data handling functionality are extremely useful when processing astronomical data.
Tom Sherlock, User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Products

Systems Pharmacology—A Case Study on Type 2 Diabetes Using Wolfram Technologies

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. In April this year, I attended the 7th Noordwijkerhout Symposium on Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics and Systems Pharmacology in the Netherlands. The conference focuses on the use of mathematical modeling in pharmacology and pharmaceutical R&D, and this year, the main topic was the emerging concept of systems pharmacology. In general terms, systems pharmacology can be seen as the combination of pharmacometrics and systems biology, with one of its key principles being the integration of biological data and mathematical models describing several different levels of biological complexity—spanning from the molecular or cellular level to that of a whole organism or population. Usually, such integration of data and models is referred to as multilevel, or multiscale, modeling, and has the important benefit of allowing us to translate information on disease and drug effects from the biochemical level—where the effects originate—to changes on the whole body or population level, which are more important from a clinical and pharmacological point of view. In this blog post, I thought we would take a closer look at what a systems pharmacology approach might look like. Specifically, I'll focus on some of the practical aspects of building complex, multilevel biological models, and how these can be dealt with using Wolfram SystemModeler.
Robert Palmer, Applications Engineer
Show More