Every four years for more than a century there’s been an International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) held somewhere in the world. In 1900 it was where David Hilbert announced his famous collection of math problems—and it’s remained the top single periodic gathering for the world’s research mathematicians.

This year the ICM is in Seoul, and I’m going to it today. I went to the ICM once before—in Kyoto in 1990. Mathematica was only two years old then, and mathematicians were just getting used to it. Plenty already used it extensively—but at the ICM there were also quite a few who said, “I do pure mathematics. How can Mathematica possibly help me?”

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For as long as I can remember, my all-time favorite activity has been creating ideas and turning them into reality—a kind of “entrepreneurism of ideas”. And over the years—in science, technology and business—I think I’ve developed some pretty good tools and strategies for doing this, that I’ve increasingly realized would be good for a lot of other people (and organizations) too.

So how does one spread idea entrepreneurism—entrepreneurism centered on ideas rather than commercial enterprises? Somewhat unwittingly I think we’ve developed a rather good vehicle—that’s both a very successful educational program, and a fascinating annual adventure for me.

Twelve years ago my book A New Kind of Science had just come out, and we were inundated with people wanting to learn more, and get involved in research around it. We considered various alternatives, but eventually we decided to organize a summer school where we would systematically teach about our methodology, while mentoring each student to do a unique original project.

From the very beginning, the summer school was a big success. And over the years we’ve gradually improved and expanded it. It’s still the Wolfram Science Summer School—and its intellectual core is still A New Kind of Science. But today it has become a broader vehicle for passing on our tools and strategies for idea entrepreneurism.

This year’s summer school just ended last week. We had 63 students from 21 countries—with a fascinating array of backgrounds and interests. Most were in college or graduate school; a few were younger or older. And over the course of the three weeks of the summer school—with great energy and intellectual entrepreneurism—each student worked towards their own unique project.
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We’ve got an incredible amount of new technology coming out this summer. Two weeks ago we launched Wolfram Programming Cloud. Today I’m pleased to announce the release of a major new version of Mathematica: Mathematica 10.

We released Mathematica 1 just over 26 years ago—on June 23, 1988. And ever since we’ve been systematically making Mathematica ever bigger, stronger, broader and deeper. But Mathematica 10—released today—represents the single biggest jump in new functionality in the entire history of Mathematica.
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Twenty-six years ago today we launched Mathematica 1.0. And I am excited that today we have what I think is another historic moment: the launch of Wolfram Programming Cloud—the first in a sequence of products based on the new Wolfram Language.

My goal with the Wolfram Language in general—and Wolfram Programming Cloud in particular—is to redefine the process of programming, and to automate as much as possible, so that once a human can express what they want to do with sufficient clarity, all the details of how it is done should be handled automatically.

I’ve been working toward this for nearly 30 years, gradually building up the technology stack that is needed—at first in Mathematica, later also in Wolfram|Alpha, and now in definitive form in the Wolfram Language. The Wolfram Language, as I have explained elsewhere, is a new type of programming language: a knowledge-based language, whose philosophy is to build in as much knowledge about computation and about the world as possible—so that, among other things, as much as possible can be automated. Continue reading

Last weekend I gave a speech at this year’s graduation event for the Stanford Online High School (OHS) that one of my children has been attending. Here’s the transcript:

Thank you for inviting me to be part of this celebration today—and congratulations to this year’s OHS graduates.

You know, as it happens, I myself never officially graduated from high school, and this is actually the first high school graduation I’ve ever been to.

It’s been fun over the past three years—from a suitable parental distance of course—to see my daughter’s experiences at OHS. One day I’m sure everyone will know about online high schools—but you’ll be able to say, “Yes, I was there when that way of doing such-and-such a thing was first invented—at OHS.”

It’s great to see the OHS community—and to see so many long-term connections being formed independent of geography. And it’s also wonderful to see students with such a remarkable diversity of unique stories.

Of course, for the graduates here today, this is the beginning of a new chapter in their stories.

I suspect some of you already have very definite life plans. Many are still exploring. It’s worth remembering that there’s no “one right answer” to life. Different people are amazingly different in what they’ll consider an “‘A’ in life”. I think the first challenge is always to understand what you really like. Then you’ve got to know what’s out there to do in the world. And then you’ve got to solve the puzzle of fitting the two together. Continue reading

Two weeks ago I spoke at SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX. Here’s a slightly edited transcript (it’s the “speaker’s cut”, including some demos I had to abandon during the talk):

Well, I’ve got a lot planned for this hour.

Basically, I want to tell you a story that’s been unfolding for me for about the last 40 years, and that’s just coming to fruition in a really exciting way. And by just coming to fruition, I mean pretty much today. Because I’m planning to show you today a whole lot of technology that’s the result of that 40-year story—that I’ve never shown before, and that I think is going to be pretty important.

I always like to do live demos. But today I’m going to be pretty extreme. Showing you a lot of stuff that’s very very fresh. And I hope at least a decent fraction of it is going to work.

OK, here’s the big theme: taking computation seriously. Really understanding the idea of computation. And then building technology that lets one inject it everywhere—and then seeing what that means. Continue reading

We’re getting closer to the first official release of the Wolfram Language—so I am starting to demo it more publicly.

Here’s a short video demo I just made. It’s amazing to me how much of this is based on things I hadn’t even thought of just a few months ago. Knowledge-based programming is going to be much bigger than I imagined…

Connected devices are central to our long-term strategy of injecting sophisticated computation and knowledge into everything. With the Wolfram Language we now have a way to describe and compute about things in the world. Connected devices are what we need to measure and interface with those things.

In the end, we want every type of connected device to be seamlessly integrated with the Wolfram Language. And this will have all sorts of important consequences. But as we work toward this, there’s an obvious first step: we have to know what types of connected devices there actually are.

So to have a way to answer that question, today we’re launching the Wolfram Connected Devices Project—whose goal is to work with device manufacturers and the technical community to provide a definitive, curated, source of systematic knowledge about connected devices.

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I have the good fortune of knowing many people, which means I end up sending out lots of holiday cards. For many years I used to send out physical cards. But last year, convenience, timeliness and ease of reply made me finally make the switch to e-cards.

I often like to write notes on the cards I send. And when I was sending out paper cards, that was straightforward to do. But what about with e-cards?

Well, it’d be easy to type messages and have them printed on the e-cards. But that seems awfully impersonal. And anyway, I rather like having at least one time each year when I do a bunch of actual writing by hand—not least so my handwriting doesn’t atrophy completely.

So there’s an obvious solution: handwritten e-cards. Which is exactly what I did this year:
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Last week I wrote about our large-scale plan to use new technology we’re building to inject sophisticated computation and knowledge into everything. Today I’m pleased to announce a step in that direction: working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, effective immediately there’s a pilot release of the Wolfram Language—as well as Mathematica—that will soon be bundled as part of the standard system software for every Raspberry Pi computer.

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