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Remembering Martin Gardner

In Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, noted mathematicians Elwyn Berlekamp, John Conway, and Richard Guy have this dedication: "To Martin Gardner, who has brought more mathematics to more millions than anyone else." Martin Gardner passed away on May 22, 2010, and I talk about my own introduction to his work at the Wolfram|Alpha Blog. On May 21, I was asked for the best book about math for a young adult. I suggested Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games (CD-ROM), which contains his 15-book canon. In my opinion, it's still the best book series for sparking an interest in mathematics. In a way, Wolfram Research has been trying to beat Martin in the noble goal of bringing math and science to the millions. We've partnered with CBS/Paramount for the NUMB3RS TV show, our CEO Stephen Wolfram wrote A New Kind of Science, co-founder Theodore Gray made what I think is the best periodic table in the world, and we built MathWorld, the most comprehensive math encyclopedia on the web.
Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Editor, Scientific Information Group
Computation & Analysis

Data Diving with Mathematica

Wolfram Research hosts lots of popular websites, including Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, and we collect a lot of web traffic data on those sites to make sure you, our visitors, are meeting your goals. To really dive deep into that data, our corporate analysis team has built on a number of Mathematica's standard data analysis features to develop a powerful, in-house computable data function for studying web traffic and other business data. In this video, corporate analysis team lead David Howell describes how using Mathematica gives his team huge advantages in discovering new patterns and relationships within our web traffic data and in delivering insightful interactive reports.
Wolfram Blog Team
Announcements & Events

Get It in Print: The Wolfram Mathematica Tutorial Collection

When we released Version 6 in May 2007, Mathematica was reinvented. We also reinvented something else that Mathematica has long been known for: its extensive and detailed product documentation. While some of you appreciated the recrafting of our tutorial content as stand-alone electronic documents, others missed the narrative of the book, and you let us know it. Which is a good thing, because it led to the creation of the Wolfram Mathematica Tutorial Collection.
Maryka Baraka, Publishing Programs Manager, Document & Media Systems
Computation & Analysis

UK Investment Returns under Conservative and Labour Governments

As the closing days of the United Kingdom election campaign have focused on the economy, I thought I would repeat the analysis that Theodore Gray did on Dow Jones returns under United States presidential parties—but using UK data. I started by going to an interactive Mathematica Demonstration that Theodore wrote. Like all Demonstrations, it doesn't just present information, it encodes the analysis, so by downloading the source code, I was able to re-deploy it on UK data quite quickly. The data was a little more difficult (detailed at the end of this post). So what did I find?
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
Announcements & Events

Stephen Wolfram’s TED Talk: Computation Is Destined to Be the Defining Idea of Our Future

We use this blog as a vehicle to highlight many of our big ideas and discoveries. Today we're pleased to share with you Stephen Wolfram's talk from the 2010 TED Conference in Long Beach, California, where he talked about the tools and methods he's spent the last 30 years developing in his quest to explore computational knowledge. TED, an organization devoted to bringing together the technology, entertainment, and design industries' most innovative thinkers to present "Ideas Worth Sharing", recently shared Stephen's ideas with the world as a "TED Talk of the Day". In the signature 18-minute video, Stephen discusses how his lifelong scientific pursuits led to the development of Mathematica, A New Kind of Science, and the computational knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha. He continues, asking new questions and proposing a fourth project---discovering our physical universe through our computational universe. "Will we find the whole of physics? I don't know for sure. But I think at this point it's sort of almost embarrassing not to at least try." ---Stephen Wolfram Click to view the transcript and slides from Stephen's talk.
Wolfram Blog Team
Education & Academic

Get Your Game On for Mathematics Awareness Month!

April is Mathematics Awareness Month, and this year's theme is "Mathematics and Sports." It's sponsored by the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics to promote the importance of math, and schools and organizations nationwide are participating by hosting presentations, competitions, and poster contests for students from elementary school through graduate school. Wolfram Research is proud to support Mathematics Awareness Month again this year. To remind students everywhere that math can be fun, we have provided complimentary Mathematica for Students licenses to several competitions this month to be distributed as prizes, including these:
Carol Cronin, Sponsorship Coordinator, Partnerships
Education & Academic

Give Your Classroom an Edge with Mathematica

Thousands of universities around the world take advantage of Mathematica's revolutionary developments for engineering, science, economics, mathematics, and more, for a vast number of courses across campus. One of those schools is Truman State University. Dana Vazzana, an associate professor of mathematics at Truman, integrates Mathematica into every course she teaches. She says using Mathematica with her students creates a dynamic classroom where students gain deeper understanding of concepts and richer insights into real-world applications of mathematics. "Anything that gets them that involved and that excited and makes them want to go and work some more has just got to be a good thing," explains Professor Vazzana.
Wolfram Blog Team
Computation & Analysis

Following Baseball with Mathematica

No sport places more importance on its statistics than does baseball. The late sportswriter Leonard Koppett wrote in his standout 1967 book The Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball that "statistics are the lifeblood" of the game. In fact, statistics are so important to baseball that they have inspired their own field: sabermetrics. Derived from SABR, the abbreviation for the Society for American Baseball Research, sabermetrics were popularized by Bill James with the publication of his first Bill James Baseball Abstract in 1977.
Marty McKee, Copywriter, Marketing Communications
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