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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Announcements & Events

Explore the Frontiers of Science: NKS Summer School 2010

In 2002, Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science (NKS) was published. Soon after, Wolfram Research began hosting annual Summer Schools centered around doing research on the topics and methods introduced by the book. The first NKS Summer School was held in 2003 at Brown University. It's that time of year again—when interested individuals all around the world apply to the NKS Summer School. By 2008, the NKS Summer School was already well established. I was one of those interested individuals, having completed my master's degree in mathematics the year before. I had been introduced to A New Kind of Science by a good friend, back when I was taking advanced undergraduate courses in physics. So when I came across the NKS Summer School in the winter of 2007, I was eager to apply.
Computation & Analysis

Down, Set, Compute! Checking Quarterback Ratings with Mathematica

Comparing favorite teams and players is a favorite pastime for sports fans. Most fans, including myself, understand their sports' basic statistics—batting averages, yards per carry, and so on—but may have trouble calculating the stats. With the Super Bowl coming up in Florida this weekend, I thought it would be interesting to see what Mathematica could do to help calculate one of the most well-known and tough-to-calculate statistics of the National Football League (NFL): quarterback passer rating.
Education & Academic

Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha Are Revolutionizing Education

Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha are revolutionizing education. Teachers and students are pretty pumped and starting to envision the possibilities. That was the chatter at our Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) 2010 booth in San Francisco this month, as we listened to Mathematica enthusiasts voice their opinions on technology and education.
Computation & Analysis

Mathematica Tests the St. Swithun’s Day Proverb

Like most in the United Kingdom, I have been trapped in my house by snow for most of the last week. Waking up again like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, to another snowy view, I have been dreaming of summer days to come. It was against this background that I thought I would get around to testing whether an old British weather proverb was true: St. Swithun's day if thou dost rain For forty days it will remain St. Swithun's day if thou be fair For forty days 'twill rain no more