Wolfram Blog: Launching Today: Free Wolfram Engine for Developers. “The Wolfram Engine is the heart of all our products. It’s what implements the Wolfram Language, with all its computational intelligence, algorithms, knowledgebase, and so on. It’s what powers our desktop products (including Mathematica), as well as our cloud platform. It’s what’s inside Wolfram|Alpha—as well as an increasing number of major production systems out in the world. And as of today, we’re making it available for anyone to download, for free, to use in their software development projects.”
mathematics
Forbes: Scientific Visualizations For Teaching Used To Mean Plaster Models
New-to-me, from Forbes: Scientific Visualizations For Teaching Used To Mean Plaster Models. “In March 2005 during renovations to the third-floor flooring of the University of Illinois’ mathematics department building, around 170 of the campus’ mathematics models were temporarily removed from their cases. This provided the opportunity to create a series of more than 2,200 high resolution photographs preserving the incredibly intricate and complex designs of the models, as well as showcasing the enormous variety of their designs.”
Wolfram Alpha: Version 12 Launches Today! (And It’s a Big Jump for Wolfram Language and Mathematica)
Wolfram Alpha: Version 12 Launches Today! (And It’s a Big Jump for Wolfram Language and Mathematica). “OK, so what’s new in 12.0? There are some big and surprising things—notably in chemistry, geometry, numerical uncertainty and database integration. But overall, there are lots of things in lots of areas—and in fact even the basic summary of them in the Documentation Center is already 19 pages long…”
The Conversation: 3 times political conflict reshaped American mathematics
The Conversation: 3 times political conflict reshaped American mathematics. “In February, my University of Richmond students and I launched … a new website on the history of American mathematics. It showcases the people who create, the institutions that support and the cultures that influence mathematics. This rich history shows that mathematics is much more than equations or multiplication facts. It’s a living, breathing discipline shaped, in part, by the political forces around it.”
Google Blog: A recipe for beating the record of most-calculated digits of pi
Google Blog: A recipe for beating the record of most-calculated digits of pi. “While I’ve been busy thinking about which flavor of pie I’m going to enjoy later today, Googler Emma Haruka Iwao has been busy using Google Compute Engine, powered by Google Cloud, to calculate the most accurate value of pi—ever. That’s 31,415,926,535,897 digits, to be exact. Emma used the power of the cloud for the task, making this the first time the cloud has been used for a pi calculation of this magnitude.”
calc.exe is now open source; there’s surprising depth in its ancient code (Ars Technica)
Ars Technica: calc.exe is now open source; there’s surprising depth in its ancient code. “Microsoft’s embrace and adoption of open source software has continued with the surprising decision to publish the code for Windows Calculator and release it on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.”
Nature: Unprovability comes to machine learning
Nature: Unprovability comes to machine learning. “Scenarios have been discovered in which it is impossible to prove whether or not a machine-learning algorithm could solve a particular problem. This finding might have implications for both established and future learning algorithms.”
