Wolfram Blog

MMA is a fantastic bit of software. It's my secret weapon for lots of tasks, including prototyping algorithms, data manipulation (it absolutely excels at this), visualisation and all sorts of miscellaneous investigatory tasks. I'd love to use it at work but as a Home Edition user my license prohibits this. Were I to accidentally start it at my day job, I'd use it for converting data between various formats, processing it, manipulating it and writing it back again, like a gigantic and insanely powerful interactive awk replacement. Since I maxed out the RAM on my laptop I now have it run at startup so it's always there for back-of-the-envelope stuff. I used it extensively in designing my side project synth[1], where I used its visualisation capabilities to figure out everything from panning algorithms to delay lines. It earned its keep most often late at night when I was tired and trying to figure out daytime-simple-but-nighttime-hard routines. The Manipulate[] function is really good for this, as it shows you the output of a function as you drag the inputs up and down. I also used it for turning mathematical formulae into C code - the CForm[] function does this very well. It's also a great way to experiment with functional programming, since that's how it mostly likes to operate. I reckon there's a lot of places you could use it, but it's too expensive to justify. I don't really care if it's open source or not, but I'd like Stephen Wolfram to have an epiphany on pricing…

There is a wolfram blog post comparing python vs wolfram from 2021: https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/04/lessons-learned-migrating-from-pyt… The linked tweet (https://x.com/WolframResearch/status/1325935891651698690?s=20) is inaccessible. Does anyone have an archive? I'd love to see pandas/df compared instead of the iterative style.

> His work is definitely worthwhile. Wolfram Language by itself is actually very cool. I really wish he would open source it. I'm not going to use any math package that isn't open source for anything. Here is the official statements of Wolfram Research on this topic: > Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source—A Dozen Reasons > https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-… See also > Episode 1: Thoughts on Wolfram & Open Source > https://soundcloud.com/wolframresearch/wolfram-on-open-source If you nevertheless insist on having an open source implementation of the Wolfram language, have a look at the answers at > https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/is-there-an-open-…

Their more recent post titled "Six Reasons Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source"[1] is even more cringey. Is this directed to managers who need to link to a reasoning against other managers making the claim for open-source alternatives? If so, this assumes those managers aren't that competent, which is insultiong at best. 1: https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolfram-langua…

Mathematica is free on Raspberry Pi, so someone could put together an amazing physical calculator: - https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/ - https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/07/11/mathematica-12-available-on-the-ne…

Wolfram Language lacks many open specifications that a usual high-level programming language should expose to their users, such as stdin stream, concurrency, memory model and so on. To some extent, their toolchain and design pattern are behind the state of the art, while the leaders are confident about the design, cf. https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-… Hoping they are pushing this great software forward to another 30 years.

Whenever I see Wolfram/Mathematica stuff like this, I'm not entirely sure if it's incredibly brilliant and will replace all computing as we know it, or completely batshit insane and impenetrable unless you've spent 20 years learning it. Usually I lean towards the latter though, and this is supported by the fact that I've never seen anybody not employed by Wolfram do this kind of thing. See also: http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/08/19/which-is-closer-local-beer-or-local…

A better idea is to write a technical blog post about a unique feature of your site. (Bonus poits for nice graphics or photographs.) For example read: http://blog.wolfram.com/ All the blog can be resumed as "You can do a lot of calculations and nice graphics with Mathematica" But many of the individual post have interesting information (and nice graphics) and got a lot of points https://hn.algolia.com/?q=wolfram.com#!/story/forever/0/blog.wolfram.c…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continued_fraction#Best_rational_approxim… will teach you how to find the best approximations in no time. If you understand that, read http://blog.wolfram.com/2011/06/30/all-rational-approximations-of-pi-a… :-)

I've seen Lenstra's talk about Escher's print gallery some years ago in Rome and then again after a few months in Pisa. One of the most captivating talks I've ever seen. He's a great speaker. I wish I had him as a professor. EDIT: forgot to add, in the Mathematica blog there is another explanation of the mathematics between the "Droste effect" and the code to obtain it: http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/04/24/droste-effect-with-mathematica/

These are most of those I follow... as you'll see, it's very difficult to find good material on maths and physics blogs, or at least I've had difficulties on finding it. Maths: http://www.arsmathematica.net/ http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ (not exactly maths but...) http://plus.maths.org/blog/ http://terrytao.wordpress.com/ http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/ http://blog.plover.com/ (sometimes) http://blog.wolfram.com/ http://gowers.wordpress.com/ Physics: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/ http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress (very biased) http://angryphysicist.wordpress.com/ http://scottaaronson.com/blog http://motls.blogspot.com/ (very biased)

I haven't been programming long and don't get the nuances of functional and declarative paradigms. But I have a hunch that even if people made some new languages that balanced out the various concerns of complex compilers, programmer control, LOC, boilerplate, ugly syntax etc, it wouldn't fix much. So, using research into how people best solve problems, I’m making a tool that helps people solve the problem of having an idea and not being able to make it a reality. Novices will still have lots of problems. They don't really think about how sprites move in a game, they think they want to make a game kinda like Asteroids or more like Mario. What will really help them is a well organized, well documented template. The problem is with documenting, organizing and making available the multitude of libraries and solved problems. Making them accessible through visual examples and natural language. http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/11/16/programming-with-natural-language-i… The Wolfram approach of writing a query, seeing the output, confirming or rejecting it is the right direction. Memorizing syntax is a big problem. [1,2,3].byPairs == [[1,2]]; [1,2].byPairs == [[1,2]]; [1].byPairs == []; This doesn't solve syntax memorization. split array by pairs == arrayPairTransform([1,2,3]) == [[1,2]] make array of pairs == arrayPairTransform([1,2]) == [[1,2]] This is closer imho. You don't really have to worry about the [1,2].byPairs being prettier than…

I side much more Conrad Wolfram on this than Stillwell [1]. Computation simply is a lot less important now as we have tools that do them with far greater speed and accuracy. And I'm from the generation that did tons of computation, but I honestly never had a great grasp of it. I just knew there were steps to be taken (leave an extra space to right as you do long multiplication) -- and I was one of the top math students in the district. In fact I'd argue that I never really understood much of any math until grad school. I was computational sophisticated, but lacked understanding. And oddly, I seem to find quite the opposite problem from what the blog author describes. I find students who know 3x5. But struggle to understand when the Fourier Transform is appropriate. Sure, if they're looking at problem sets at the back of the chapter about Fourier Transforms then they'll start with it, but in the real world they lack the conceptual understanding of it. I've met students who can compute the SVD, they can tell you the text book definition, but don't actually intuitively know what it means. They don't know when it should be applied, or when it is applied, what it means. [1] http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/11/23/conrad-wolframs-ted-talk-stop-teach…

How they did it: https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/03/24/the-solution-of-the-zodiac-killers…

This reminded me of the One-Liner Mathematica competition that Wolfram holds: https://blog.wolfram.com/2022/10/28/winners-of-the-2022-one-liner-and-… https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/24/the-winners-of-the-2021-one-liner-… https://blog.wolfram.com/2020/10/20/the-winners-of-the-2020-one-liner-…

There is an interesting article about the reasons why Wolfram decided against open source and why their products would not have been possible otherwise: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-… As much as I don’t like it either, I can understand their perspective and actually believe that it might have been very hard to create and sustain such a comprehensive, thoughtfully and consistently designed language with an open source model. But it may be interesting to see if there are projects of similar scale with similar requirements that thrive (long-term) on a free and open source model.

There is an example in Mathematica [1] that illustrates a similar point using Rock-Paper-Scissors game. It uses a very simple strategy to predict human opponent [2], but it appears to work well. (Although, at the moment the demonstration does not seem to be working at all (I tried it in Firefox and Chrome)). [1]. https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/RockPaperScissorsWithAIPlayer/ [2]. https://blog.wolfram.com/2014/01/20/how-to-win-at-rock-paper-scissors/

(2019) Interesting compared to this recent take: https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolfram-langua…

It is not and has never been open-source. In fact they wrote https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-… .

As another commenter pointed out they are pretty adamant about not going open source [1]. But then later they walked it back a little and claimed they are "like open source" [2]. Funny there are 12 reasons for being closed source and only 6 for being "like" open source. And the reasons they're like open source are pretty weak. The first one (free use) has a lot of restrictions like the way their cloud product locks you out of your files 60 days after they're created. It's cool what Wolfam has achieved, but it's hard to justify going with a closed tool these days with all the interest in open science and the capabilities that are now available in the open source world. [1] https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-… [2] https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolfram-langua…

There's this: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-…

I'm aghast at this point: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-… The blog post was probably literally written in and hosted entirely on open source software which were highly innovative at their earlier stages and continue to be highly innovative. This is a very self-serving presentation of an idea. Also, I officially dislike the word innovation.

The article is a bit older, but metadata analytics can be used to "unveil" the key conspirators that led to what we today know as the "American Revolution"[1] - please note how little data they use to find out who calls the shots, and whom you might want to disappear if you wanted to keep the colonies closely aligned with George III. Widespread enough, this can be used to find dissidents today, suppressing ethically legitimate uprisings against injustice. [1] https://blog.wolfram.com/2017/06/29/analyzing-social-networks-of-colon…

Not exhaustive, but you might find this interesting: https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/05/25/sleuthing-darkside-crypto-ransom-p…

For anyone curious or who is still attached to pi, here is a response to the tau manifesto: https://blog.wolfram.com/2015/06/28/2-pi-or-not-2-pi/

It is now possible to use Python inside Mathematica. Take a look at: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/05/16/announcing-the-wolfram-client-libr… https://reference.wolfram.com/language/WolframClientForPython/ It is also possible to run the Wolfram Kernel inside a Jupyter Notebook: https://github.com/WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter

Regarding your second point - I don't have a horse in that race, other than tremendously enjoying my personal license that I pay for out of my pocket; but I found their arguments[1] quite reasonable. I think there was an HN discussion about this some time ago. [1] https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-…

[Note: haven't watched the lecture yet.] Though see also https://blog.wolfram.com/2011/06/30/all-rational-approximations-of-pi-… - "All Rational Approximations of Pi Are Useless", in the sense that it's no harder to memorize the decimal expansion with the same level of precision. 22/7 can be "better", or at least easier, for hand calculations, if only 2 digits of precision is needed and one of the other terms in the calculation can cancel out the 7 or the 11 (or 22) in the above ratio.

Sort of Wolframs reply to why Wolfram is not open-source: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-…

So, a lot of people are annoyed by Wolfram, but this is relevant as I think that's something that Wolfram does in his free time: http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/11/my-hobby-hunting-for-our-universe/