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A Sneak Peek at Mathematica 8

Continuing with tradition, Wolfram Research Founder and CEO Stephen Wolfram kicked off last month's Wolfram Technology Conference 2010 by highlighting the year's top developments and sharing insights on new directions for Wolfram technologies. This year's conference keynote featured the unveiling of the forthcoming Mathematica 8, a demonstration of its powerful new functionality, and future opportunities for Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha. In the first part of this series, Stephen talked about Mathematica's "unstoppable momentum" and announced some of the new features coming in Mathematica 8.
Wolfram Blog Team
Design & Visualization

How to Make a Webcam Intruder Alarm with Mathematica

Ever since I wrote the "Doing Spy Stuff with Mathematica" blog post, I have had a feeling that I am being watched. Time to build some office security using Mathematica Home Edition! First, I am going to make use of an imminent new Mathematica command CurrentImage, which will import a real-time image from a video device. Let's get some test images using the webcam on my laptop.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Best of Blog

aMAZEing Image Processing in Mathematica

A little over a mile from the Wolfram Research Europe Ltd. office, where I work, lies Blenheim Palace, which has a rather nice hedge maze. As I was walking around it on the weekend, I remembered a map solving example by Peter Overmann using new image processing features in an upcoming version of Mathematica. I was excited to apply the idea to this real-world example. Once back at my computer, I started by using Bing Maps to get the aerial photo (data created by Intermap, NAVTEQ, and Getmapping plc). The maze is meant to depict a cannon with cannon balls below it and flags and trumpets above.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Announcements & Events

Remembering Jerry Uhl

Wolfram Research is saddened to announce the passing of Jerry Uhl, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Illinois. Jerry's scholarly contributions to the field of mathematics are numerous, but we will remember him best for his passion for education and mathematics reform, which led him to the development of the Calculus&Mathematica program that is still used today by progressive math programs. For his support of Mathematica and his innovation in math education, Wolfram Research presented Jerry with the first Mathematica Pioneer Award in 2008. The following video was made for the presentation of that award.
Jean Buck, Director of Content Development, Wolfram|Alpha
Announcements & Events

Benoît Mandelbrot

Twenty-five years ago, the Mandelbrot set was published on the cover of Scientific American, in connection with an A. K. Dewdney Computer Recreations column. A few days ago, the original Mandelbrot set column was re-released. The Mandelbrot set became a rite of passage for anyone programming mathematical images. For me, I was making images on a Mac Plus, and sent some of them out in a zine I was running at the time. As a result, Piers Anthony asked me to help get fractal images and facts for his Mode series. In the course of this, Piers and I asked for and received permission to use the Mandelbrot set from Benoît himself. "You probably don't need my permission, but I'm happy to grant it to you."
Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Editor, Scientific Information Group S M Blinder, Senior Scientist, Document & Media Systems
Computation & Analysis

World Statistics Day

As a society, we seem to love data. We slice it, dice it, aggregate it, and analyze it. It tells us about the people, places, and things around us and around the world. It informs public policies and the public. It's easy to take for granted official statistics collected and presented by government agencies or statistics collected by non-governmental curators, because data seems to be everywhere, but it's important to remember that it takes a huge amount of work to collect that data and provide it in a usable form. World Statistics Day is a good time to remember that hard work and the impact information from the collected data has on our daily life.
Darren Glosemeyer, Lead Statistics Developer, Kernel Technology
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