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Best of Blog

Building a Microscopy Application in Mathematica

As a change from my usual recreational content, today I thought I would describe a real Mathematica application that I wrote. The project came from my most important Mathematica user—not because she spends a lot of money with Wolfram Research, but because I am married to her! Her company, Particle Therapeutics, works on needle-free injection devices that fire powdered drug particles into the skin on a supersonic gas shock wave. She was trying to analyze the penetration characteristics on a test medium by photographing thin slices of a target under a microscope and measuring the locations of the particles. The problem was that her expensive image processing software was doing a poor job of identifying overlapping particles and gave her no manual override for its mistakes. Faced with the alternative of holding rulers up to her screen and recording each value by hand, I promised that I could do better in Mathematica, with the added advantage that now her image processing tool would be integrated into her analysis code to go from image file to report document in a single workflow.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Education & Academic

Financial Strategies with Mathematica Workshop and Seminar in New York on September 15

Mathematica 8 added a slew of powerful finance functions to its already large list of capabilities when it was released last November. To help highlight some of these features as well as assist those who want to use them, Wolfram Research is presenting both a finance workshop and a free seminar at the Club Quarters, Wall Street hotel in New York City on September 15.
Michael Kelly, Senior Wolfram Technology Consultant, Wolfram Technology Group
Leading Edge

Putting CDF into Play

Now that the Computable Document Format (CDF) is officially released, the real fun has begun. At least for me. Whether or not you plan to start using CDF in your own work anytime soon, you've got to admit, it's pretty cool. From publishing textbooks and making complex information easy to understand to recreational games and everyday blogging, CDF truly makes it possible to communicate ideas in a more participatory way—as adopters of the format have already proven. It has been exciting to see the tremendous interest in CDF following last month's launch. Although CDF is a new advancement, it's clear that the possibilities it presents resonate with authors and readers alike, and hence with publishers as well.
Maryka Baraka, Publishing Programs Manager, Document & Media Systems
Education & Academic

Exploring America’s Debt Problem

It has been a roller coaster ride for the stock market lately. On August 1, the United States government avoided a default by a last minute deal to raise the debt limit. A few days later, we witnessed the first ever downgrade of U.S. credit by Standard & Poor's. Using Mathematica's TradingChart command, we can witness the stock market's immediate negative reaction to the downgrade. Note: Mouse over the chart to see the daily open, high, low, and closing price of the S&P 500 index.
Samuel Chen, Product Manager, Technical Communication & Strategy Michael Kelly, Senior Wolfram Technology Consultant, Wolfram Technology Group
Announcements & Events

Program Details Announced for Wolfram Technology Conference 2011

Only 10 more weeks to go until the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011, and we have just added details for nearly 50 talks and interactive sessions to the conference website. We will cover a broad array of topics across mathematics and statistics; finance, business, and social sciences; education; software development; science and engineering; electronic publishing; visualization; and more! Presentation titles and abstracts are being added every day! See our current list of talks and workshops here.
Wolfram Blog Team
Announcements & Events

Free Mathematica Virtual Conference 2011

Things are really moving fast at Wolfram these days. Mathematica 8 introduced 500 new functions and 7 new or extended application areas, including the revolutionary free-form input, Wolfram|Alpha integration, and a direct way to create our groundbreaking Computable Document Format (CDF), which was officially released to the public in late July. To help keep current users and those who are interested in Wolfram technology up to date, we will be hosting a free half-day Wolfram Mathematica Virtual Conference. With our global audience in mind, we are offering this event on two separate days in two different time zones: Monday, September 26, 2011:Noon–4:15pm Eastern Daylight Time Tuesday, September 27, 2011:Noon–4:15pm Central European Summer Time This virtual event is packed with tips, tricks, and techniques from Wolfram developers and Mathematica experts and will help you get the most out of Mathematica—regardless of your discipline or familiarity with Wolfram technologies.
Wolfram Blog Team
Best of Blog

How I Made Wine Glasses from Sunflowers

Eons ago, plants worked out the secret of arranging equal-size seeds in an ever-expanding pattern around a central point so that regardless of the size of the arrangement, the seeds pack evenly. The sunflower is a well-known example of such a "spiral phyllotaxis" pattern: It's really magical that this works at all, since the spatial relationship of each seed to its neighbors is unique, changing constantly as the pattern expands outwardly—unlike, say, the cells in a honeycomb, which are all equivalent. I wondered if the same magic could be applied to surfaces that are not flat, like spheres, toruses, or wine glasses. It's an interesting question from an aesthetic point of view, but also a practical one: the answer has applications in space exploration and modern architecture.
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Announcements & Events

Launching the Computable Document Format (CDF): Don’t Compress the Idea, Expand the Medium

Today we launched our Computable Document Format, or CDF, to bring documents to life with the power of computation. CDF binds together and refines lots of technologies and ideas from our last 20+ years into a single standard—knowledge apps, symbolic documents, automation layering, and democratized computation, to name a few. Disparate though these might appear, they come together in one coherent aim for CDF: connecting authors and readers much better than ever before. The idea is to provide a knowledge container that's as easy to author as documents, but with the interactivity of apps—for CDFs to make live interactivity as everyday a way to communicate as spreadsheets made charts.
Conrad Wolfram
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