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Computation & Analysis

Happy 10*9*8+7+6-5+4*321 !

I was amazed to see this tweet from our friends at the Museum of Mathematics:

10*9*8+7+6-5+4*321Happy New Year!

— Museum of Math (@MoMath1) January 3, 2012 A quick check with Mathematica verified that, yes indeed, 10*9*8+7+6-5+4*321 = 2012. Wow! How in the world did anyone discover that rare factoid? And how long will it be until another year arrives that can be similarly expressed? That's the sort of question that's so easy to answer with Mathematica that I couldn't not have a look. It turns out that what seemed to me like a rare jewel is as common as dirt. In fact, there is only one year in the next 100 that can't be expressed by interspersing +, -, *, /, or nothing between the numbers in order from 10 to 1! In subsequent correspondence with George Hart, the museum's Chief of Content, he told me that he learned the idea from Hans Havermann, who wrote about it in a blog post last year. I've discovered what he had up his sleeve: abundant computing.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Announcements & Events

C and a Box of Chocolates: Video Presentations from the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011

Tips for analyzing your social networks with Mathematica, workshops for publishing with CDF, real-world solutions for your financial applications—these are just a few of the many highlights from the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011. If you missed a talk or weren't able to attend, we've now made videos of select presentations available on the Presentations and Talks section of the conference website.
Wolfram Blog Team
Education & Academic

The Wolfram Education Portal Is Here!

Teachers, are you looking for a new way to integrate technology into your classroom? How about through a dynamic textbook or pre-generated lesson plans? Students, are you looking for some extra help or practice in your classes? How about using interactive demonstrations and widgets to help understand the concepts you are learning? The Wolfram Education Portal is the answer for students and teachers alike! We are happy to announce the launch of the free Beta version of the Wolfram Education Portal. The portal comes equipped with a dynamic and interactive textbook, lesson plans aligned to the common core standards, and many other supplemental materials for your courses, including Wolfram Demonstrations, widgets, and videos. The Education Portal currently contains full materials for Algebra and partial materials for Calculus, but will continue to grow and improve with your comments and feedback.
Wolfram Blog Team
Best of Blog

The Longest Word Ladder Puzzle Ever

UPDATE: The solution to the puzzle and more comments from Jon have been added at the bottom of the post. On the long flight to the recent Wolfram Technology Conference, I ended up on the puzzle page of a newspaper. My attention was drawn to a word ladder puzzle, where you must fill in a sequence of words from clues, but each word differs from the previous by only a single letter. Here, for example, is a simple puzzle already solved:
best from a position of superiority or authority
bast strong woody fibers obtained especially from the phloem of from various plants
bash a vigorous blow
bath a vessel containing liquid in which something is immersed (as to process it or to maintain it at a constant temperature or to lubricate it)
math a science (or group of related sciences) dealing with the logic of quantity and shape and arrangement
I wasn't going to do a blog entry on this, as it is a very similar task to my "Exploring Synonym Chains" post that I wrote some time ago, but that changed with a chance conversation at the (excellent) Technology Conference. Proving that one never stops learning, Charles Pooh, one of our graph theory developers, pointed out to me that my synonyms item could have been done much better. I had broken one of the very rules that I wrote about in my "10 Tips for Fast Mathematica Code" entry—"Use built-in functions." I had effectively re-implemented the built-in Mathematica commands GraphPeriphery and GraphDiameter. So, armed with these two new functions, let's find the longest word ladder puzzle that can be made using Mathematica's English dictionary.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Announcements & Events

Deliver Professional Applications with Wolfram Player Pro

Does this scenario sound familiar? You've created a real-time analytics interface for your internal data in Mathematica and you want to share it with your colleagues. But they don't have, or typically need, Mathematica. You aren't alone. Many of our users have approached me with similar concerns. That's why we created Wolfram Player Pro—the professional platform for running interactive applications based on Wolfram technology. Player Pro is a high-level deployment engine for application developers. We've just released a new version that supports almost all the functionality of Mathematica 8, giving you everything you need to deploy your applications to your colleagues or clients. And with this version, you can not only deploy reports, applets, and other material as full-featured desktop applications or documents, but also as interactive web tools using the new browser plugin.
Bradley Harden, Commercial & Government Sales Manager, Commercial Sales
Design & Visualization

How to Count Cells, Annihilate Sailboats, and Warp the Mona Lisa

In a recent series of Image Processing with Mathematica workshops held at universities across the United States, we presented Mathematica's new image processing functionality and applied it on the spot to attendees' real-world problems. It was amazing to me to see how rapidly and flexibly Mathematica could be applied to solve complex image processing problems. For example, it might seem like writing a program to automatically count cells in an image would be a master's research project, but amazingly you can do it with a few lines of Mathematica code. Below I am using morphological operations and measurement tools to segment and analyze red blood cells in a microscopy image. Cell segmentation and hole filling can be done with an intensity thresholding using Binarize and FillingTransform:
Shadi Ashnai, Manager of Sound & Vision, Algorithms R&D
Announcements & Events

Two Hundred Thousand Snowflake Greetings to You and Yours

Take Stephen Wolfram's theory of the universe, add a dash of symmetry, and what do you get? Snowflakes. Cellular automata—the basis of Stephen's theory—typically operate on rectlinear grids. But with suitable automata rules and a simple geometric transformation, you can achieve patterns with six-fold dihedral symmetry, the symmetry of snowflakes. My colleague Ed Pegg Jr. showed that idea nicely in his Demonstration "Snowflake-Like Patterns”. I started with his Demonstration; added some ideas from Matthew Szudzik's related Demonstration, "Snowflake Growth”; and fine-tuned the rendering to recall Bentley's classic snowflake photos, arriving at this interactive snowflake generator.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Announcements & Events

Mathematica 8 Year in Review

Mathematica 8 introduced powerful new advances in technical computing. Among them: free-form input and Wolfram|Alpha integration; fully integrated, specialist technical functionality in a number of application areas; tools to develop faster and more powerful applications; and the Computable Document Format (CDF). At the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011, the Wolfram directors who led the development of these new capabilities presented a Mathematica 8 Year in Review:
Wolfram Blog Team
Products

Mathematica Q&A Series: Converting to Conventional Mathematical Typesetting

Got questions about Mathematica? The Wolfram Blog has answers! We'll regularly answer selected questions from users around the web. You can submit your question directly to the Q&A Team. This week's question comes from Jee: How can I transform the output of partial differentiation such as f(1, 0)[x, y] to the mathematical form ? Read below or watch this screencast for the answer (we recommend viewing it in full-screen mode): We will assume that the reader is already familiar with the basics of differentiation in Mathematica. To quickly catch up with the topic, one should read the recent Q&A blog post "Three Functions for Computing Derivatives”.
Vitaliy Kaurov, Director of Community Engagement
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