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Celebrating Mathematica’s First Quarter Century

Today it’s exactly a quarter of a century since we launched Mathematica 1.0 on June 23, 1988. Much has come and gone in the world of computing since that time. But I’m pleased to say that through all of it Mathematica has just kept getting stronger and stronger.

Stephen Wolfram
Products

Energy Resource Dynamics with the New System Dynamics Library for SystemModeler

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Wolfram SystemModeler ships with model libraries for a large selection of domains such as electronics, mechanics, and biochemistry. Now I am pleased to present a new library in the family, the SystemDynamics library by François E. Cellier and Stefan Fabricius. System dynamics, a methodology developed by Jay Forrester in the '60s and '70s, is well suited for understanding the dynamics of large-scale systems with diverse components. It has been famously applied by the Club of Rome to investigate the limits of human growth; other applications include production management, life sciences, and economics (some showcases of the methodology can be found here).
Mikael Forsgren, Senior Applications Engineer, SystemModeler
Announcements & Events

There Was a Time before Mathematica…

In a few weeks it’ll be 25 years ago: June 23, 1988—the day Mathematica was launched. Late the night before we were still duplicating floppy disks and stuffing product boxes. But at noon on June 23 there I was at a conference center in Santa Clara starting up Mathematica in public for the first time:

Stephen Wolfram
Education & Academic

A “Trivial” Probability Problem

I am a junkie for a good math problem. Over the weekend, I encountered such a good problem on a favorite subject of mine--probability. It's the last problem from the article "A Mathematical Trivium" by V. I. Arnol'd, Russian Mathematical Surveys 46(1), 1991, 271–278. It's short enough to reproduce in its entirety: "Find the mathematical expectation of the area of the projection of a cube with edge of length 1 onto a plane with an isotropically distributed random direction of projection." In other words, what is the average area of a cube's shadow over all possible orientations? This blog post explores the use of Mathematica to understand and ultimately solve the problem. It recreates how I approached the problem.
Oleksandr Pavlyk, Senior Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D
Computation & Analysis

Optimizing Instrumentation Design with Mathematica: Neutron Polarizer

Using Mathematica, Wolfgang Schmidt, a scientist at the Jülich Centre for Neutron Science, designed new neutron optical components to improve the efficiency of one of the most powerful spectrometers available for neutron scattering research. Mathematica's flexible programming language allowed Schmidt to quickly write new programs and verify lengthy calculations for simulations he needed to investigate for spectrometer upgrades, which included a neutron polarizer. With Mathematica, he could test and visualize various parameters that helped him design the polarizer and optimize its performance.
Wolfram Blog Team
Announcements & Events

Why Would a Mathematica User Care about R?

The benefits of linking from Mathematica to other languages and tools differ from case to case. But unusually, in the case of the new RLink in Mathematica 9, I think the benefits have very little to do with R, the language. The real benefit, I believe, is in the connection it makes to the R community. When we first added the MathLink libraries for C, there were real benefits in farming out intensive numerical work (though Mathematica performance improvements over the years and development of the compiler have greatly reduced the occasions where that would be worth the effort). Creating an Excel link added an alternative interface paradigm to Mathematica that wasn't available in the Mathematica front end. But in the case of R, it isn't immediately obvious that it does many things that you can't already do in Mathematica or many that it does significantly better. However, with RLink I now have immediate access to the work of the R community through the add-on libraries that they have created to extend R into their field. A great zoo of these free libraries fill out thousands of niches--sometimes popular, sometimes obscure--but lots of them. There are over 4,000 right here and more elsewhere. At a stroke, all of them are made immediately available to the Mathematica environment, interpreted through the R language runtime.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Computation & Analysis

Making Formulas… for Everything—From Pi to the Pink Panther to Sir Isaac Newton

Here at Wolfram Research and at Wolfram|Alpha we love mathematics and computations. Our favorite topics are algorithms, followed by formulas and equations. For instance, Mathematica can calculate millions of (more precisely, for all practical purposes, infinitely many) integrals, and Wolfram|Alpha knows hundreds of thousands of mathematical formulas (from Euler's formula and BBP-type formulas for pi to complicated definite integrals containing sin(x)) and plenty of physics formulas (e.g from Poiseuille's law to the classical mechanics solutions of a point particle in a rectangle to the inverse-distance potential in 4D in hyperspherical coordinates), as well as lesser-known formulas, such as formulas for the shaking frequency of a wet dog, the maximal height of a sandcastle, or the cooking time of a turkey. Recently we added formulas for a variety of shapes and forms, and the Wolfram|Alpha Blog showed some examples of shapes that were represented through mathematical equations and inequalities. These included fictional character curves:
Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Announcements & Events

Now Available: Wolfram Virtual Conference Spring 2013 Videos and Presentations

Thank you to all who made the Wolfram Virtual Conference Spring 2013 a great success. The free event featured two tracks of talks covering applications of Wolfram technologies in industry, education, and research as well as a Q&A with our experts and access to virtual networking. Attendees of all experience levels joined the event to gain new insights on how to get the most out of our technologies, including Mathematica's Predictive Interface, CDF and EnterpriseCDF, Wolfram SystemModeler, and more.
Wolfram Blog Team
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