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Education & Academic

The Circles of Descartes

Somewhere, you've likely been forced to learn how fractions work, and how to calculate 2/7 + 2/5. To some extent, fractions have been falling out of favor in the world, losing out to decimals. The New York Stock Exchange gave up fractions on April 9, 2001. Much of the time, a decimal is okay. Sometimes, though, especially in mathematics, exact values are desired. Instead of a value being 3.00000000...00727..., it is exactly 3. Or exactly 10/35 + 14/35 = 24/35. For fractions themselves, the Farey sequence is quite interesting—the reduced fractions between 0 and 1 where the denominator is less than or equal to a particular value, like 7. For example, the F7 Farey sequence is the the first row in the following block. The next row has the denominator. The third row is twice the reciprocal of the denominator squared. The fourth row is the denominator from the third row.
Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Editor, Scientific Information Group
Announcements & Events

Announcing the Wolfram Data Summit

The creation of large data repositories has been a key historical indicator of social and intellectual development—and indeed perhaps one of the defining characteristics of the whole progress of civilization. And through our work on Wolfram|Alpha—with its insatiable appetite for systematic data—we have gained a uniquely broad view of the many great data repositories that […]

Stephen Wolfram
Announcements & Events

Get Ready for the Wolfram Technology Conference 2010

Let Wolfram technologies—present and future—be part of your long-term software solution. Get opportunities to learn from Mathematica experts. Gain hands-on experience that will enhance and expand how you use Wolfram|Alpha. You can do all of this and more at the Wolfram Technology Conference 2010, being held the second week of October in Champaign, Illinois, USA.
Stephanie Funkhouser, Events Manager, Marketing Communications
Announcements & Events

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
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