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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
Announcements & Events

Boost Productivity: Leverage the Power and Flexibility of Workbench 2

It happens to everyone---you spend forever digging around in your filesystem for the dataset you need to finish your work. But you can't remember the name or enough about the contents to be able to search for it. Searching is wasted time, time that would be far better spent on productive tasks. What users like myself really need is for our tools to reflect the way we actually work, and that's where project-based workflows in tools like
Adam Berry, Wolfram Development Suite Product Manager, Kernel Technology
Computation & Analysis

Get Ready for March Madness 2010 with Mathematica

For every college basketball fan, there come points in your life when you have to make some decisions, tough decisions. Who will be in your Final Four this year? Will the number-one seeds ride the bracket to the Final Four? Who's the 5–12 seed upset? How will the Big Ten fare? We're heading for the tipoff of what I feel is the greatest sports weekend in the United States. While gearing up for a lot of game watching, I found a great blog post from last March by Jeff Todd, one of our Commercial Sales Account Managers, called "March Madness in Mathematica." In it he explained how he created an interactive NCAA Men's Basketball bracket in Mathematica.
Cory Hatfield, Public Relations Associate, Public & Community Relations
Computation & Analysis

Hurrah for 3.14159265358979… Day!

This March 14 marks the 22nd annual Pi Day. You can learn a lot about pi on MathWorld, Wolfram|Alpha, The Wolfram Functions Site, and the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. And since pi is a built-in Mathematica symbol, you can find more information in the Mathematica Documentation Center. I remember my first Pi Day celebration---in the fourth grade. My teacher, Mr. Thompson, had our entire class cut construction paper strips and write numbers on each piece of paper. The end result was Northview Elementary School's largest paper chain, with over 300 of the constant's numerals.
Cory Hatfield, Public Relations Associate, Public & Community Relations
Announcements & Events

Exposed! Workbench 2’s Contribution to Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha's mission---to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone---is a major software engineering effort. With millions of lines of code and hundreds of team members, a sophisticated code-base manager is essential in making the project possible. Enter Wolfram Workbench. Wolfram Workbench 2, the recently released version of Wolfram's state-of-the-art software engineering and deployment tool, is used at all levels of the Wolfram|Alpha project, from data curation and quality assurance to documentation and framework development. With its leading code-editing, navigation, and project-management tools, Workbench is a scalable solution that is necessary for building and growing Wolfram|Alpha. In this video, two Wolfram|Alpha developers describe Workbench's invaluable role in the project.
Wolfram Blog Team
Announcements & Events

The Next-Generation Integrated Development Environment: Wolfram Workbench 2

Wolfram Workbench 2 is out today. New in Version 2 is the ability to create and integrate documentation for your Mathematica applications, as well as a host of improvements to code editing, navigation, and more. Workbench is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) with a powerful suite of tools to help you quickly create innovative, next-generation applications from concept to completion. You can work with any Eclipse-supported language, making Workbench a very efficient organizational tool. It's a powerful tool for small projects as well as large scale applications. How do we know? It is one of our key tools in the development of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and other Wolfram technologies.
Wolfram Blog Team
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