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Announcements & Events

A Visit to Disney’s Magic Kingdom

I just finished giving a short presentation to several thousand screaming fans at the D23 Disney fan convention in Anaheim, California. When I say “screaming fans,” what I mean is Disney fans who were literally screaming at what I had to say. This already somewhat improbable situation was made all the more surprising by the fact that they were screaming about FindClusters. Well, technically, most of them may not have actually realized that’s what they were screaming about, because they were seeing only the output of the command, not the actual Mathematica code. But the thing they were so excited about was direct output from Mathematica, and the key differentiating factor that made it so interesting to them was the ability of FindClusters to discern, differentiate, and illuminate the shifting moods and emotions of animated feature films.
Theodore Gray, Cofounder, Wolfram Research, Inc.; Founder, Touch Press
Education & Academic

Attention Teachers and Educators—Good News!

The Wolfram Demonstrations Project has newly organized its K--12 interactive content to fit United States Common Core State Standards. Engagement, exploration, discovery---these are the staples of good education. Giving students the freedom to be curious and the tools to satisfy that curiosity helps develop independent thinkers and confident problem-solvers. With the Demonstrations Project, students can visualize, manipulate, and explore the very principles that are being taught in the classroom. Teachers can enrich their lesson plans with cutting-edge and engaging content by exploring the Demonstrations database by grade level and Common Core Standard.
Wolfram Blog Team
Education & Academic

Mathematica Summer Camp 2013 Comes to an End

Thirty-three extremely intelligent high school students gathered at Bentley University July 7-19 to participate in our second annual Mathematica Summer Camp. The program lasted two weeks, and within this small window of time, students created their very own Mathematica projects. At the end of the camp, students presented these projects to their peers, camp instructors, and Stephen Wolfram. Projects ranged from games created in Mathematica to a Demonstration of the "Wavefunction and Probability Density of a Coupled Quantum Harmonic Oscillator." These projects will be posted to the Wolfram Demonstrations Project here, adding to the great work of those from 2012!
Crystal Fantry, Education Content Manager
Announcements & Events

Announcing Wolfram Community

When 11-year-old Jesse Friedman won a programming prize at the Wolfram Technology Conference last year, I pondered the diversity of our global user community---from children to Nobel Prize laureates, from CTOs to astronauts, to the thousands of people on the planet who help the world tick every day using the tools we make. We always have a great atmosphere at our annual Technology Conference, where developers and users mingle and share their stories. Imagine if we could take this interaction and somehow make it available every day to everyone. We hope to achieve this with Wolfram Community, a new virtual home for our big family, which we are very pleased to announce today. Now the people who make our wonderful technologies and the people who use them to make wonderful things are just a few clicks away from each other. At the outset, Wolfram Community is a platform for questions and answers, idea sharing, and discussions about all of our technologies---including Mathematica, SystemModeler, Wolfram|Alpha, and all the rest. With time, not only do we envision uniting users across our technologies, but that the system will grow to provide additional features, including deeper integration with our products themselves, file sharing, and much more, offering a medium designed for creative collaboration. And if you already have a Wolfram ID, you’re all set to go—just sign in and start chatting.
Vitaliy Kaurov, Director of Community Engagement
Best of Blog

Using Formulas… for Everything—From a Complex Analysis Class to Political Cartoons to Music Album Covers

In my last blog post, I discussed how to construct closed-form trigonometric formulas for sketches of people’s faces. Using similar techniques, Wolfram|Alpha has recently added a collection of hundreds of such closed-form curves for faces, shapes, animals, logos and signatures. In today’s post, I want to show some of the entertaining things one can do with these parametrized curves. Although these are just simple curves, a large variety of fun images (and animations) can be constructed from them. These can then be used, for example, in political cartoons, talk shows, posters, music album covers or just to spice up an advanced calculus or first-year theoretical mechanics class. I will first discuss the fun applications, and then the more mathematical ones.
Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Computation & Analysis

Random and Optimal Mathematica Walks on IMDb’s Top Films

Or: How I Learned to Watch the Best Movies in the Best Way I remember when I lived across the street from an art movie theater called Le Club, looking at the movie posters on my way back home was often enough to get me in the ticket line. The director or main actors would ring a bell, or a close friend had recommended the title. Sometimes the poster alone would be appealing enough to lure me in. Even today there are still occasions when I make decisions from limited visual information, like when flipping through movie kiosks, TV guides, or a stack of DVDs written in languages I can't read. So how can Mathematica help? We'll take a look at the top 250 movies rated on IMDb. Based on their posters and genres, how can one create a program that suggests which movies to see? What is the best way to see the most popular movies in sequence?
Matthias Odisio, Software Developer, Algorithms R&D
Best of Blog

Using Mathematica to Simulate and Visualize Fluid Flow in a Box

The motion of fluid flow has captured the interest of philosophers and scientists for a long time. Leonardo da Vinci made several sketches of the motion of fluid and made a number of observations about how water and air behave. He often observed that water had a swirling motion, sometimes big and sometimes small, as shown in the sketch below. We would now call such swirling motions vortices, and we have a systematic way of understanding the behavior of fluids through the Navier–Stokes equations. Let's first start with understanding these equations.
Paritosh Mokhasi, Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
Best of Blog

Is There Any Point to the 12 Times Table?

My government (I'm in the UK) recently said that children here should learn up to their 12 times table by the age of 9. Now, I always believed that the reason why I learned my 12 times table was because of the money system that the UK used to have---12 pennies in a shilling. Since that madness ended with decimalization the year after I was born, by the late 1970s when I had to learn my 12 times table, it already seemed to be an anachronistic waste of time.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
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