The Summer Camp Was a Success!

How far can one get in teaching computational thinking to high-school students in two weeks? Judging by the results of this year’s Wolfram High-School Summer Camp the answer is: remarkably far.

I’ve been increasingly realizing what an immense and unique opportunity there now is to teach computational thinking with the whole stack of technology we’ve built up around the Wolfram Language. But it was a thrill to see just how well this seems to actually work with real high-school students—and to see the kinds of projects they managed to complete in only two weeks.

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The Philosophy of Chemicals

“We’ve just got to decide: is a chemical like a city or like a number?” I spent my day yesterday—as I have for much of the past 30 years—designing new features of the Wolfram Language. And yesterday afternoon one of my meetings was a fast-paced discussion about how to extend the chemistry capabilities of the language.

At some level the problem we were discussing was quintessentially practical. But as so often turns out to be the case for things we do, it ultimately involves some deep intellectual issues. And to actually get the right answer—and to successfully design language features that will stand the test of time—we needed to plumb those depths, and talk about things that usually wouldn’t be considered outside of some kind of philosophy seminar.

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A British Train Station

A week ago a new train station, named “Cambridge North”, opened in Cambridge, UK. Normally such an event would be far outside my sphere of awareness. (I think I last took a train to Cambridge in 1975.) But last week people started sending me pictures of the new train station, wondering if I could identify the pattern on it:

And, yes, it does indeed look a lot like patterns I’ve spent years studying—that come from simple programs in the computational universe. My first—and still favorite—examples of simple programs are one-dimensional cellular automata like this:

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Starting now, in celebration of its 15th anniversary, A New Kind of Science will be freely available in its entirety, with high-resolution images, on the web or for download.

It’s now 15 years since I published my book A New Kind of Science—more than 25 since I started writing it, and more than 35 since I started working towards it. But with every passing year I feel I understand more about what the book is really about—and why it’s important. I wrote the book, as its title suggests, to contribute to the progress of science. But as the years have gone by, I’ve realized that the core of what’s in the book actually goes far beyond science—into many areas that will be increasingly important in defining our whole future. Continue reading

(An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language is available in print, as an ebook, and free on the web—as well as in Wolfram Programming Lab in the Wolfram Open Cloud. There’s also now a free online hands-on course based on it.)

a book entitled An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language—as part of my effort to teach computational thinking to the next generation. I just published the second edition of the book—with (among other things) a significantly extended section on modern machine learning.

I originally expected my book’s readers would be high schoolers and up. But it’s actually also found a significant audience among middle schoolers (11- to 14-year-olds). So the question now is: can one teach the core concepts of modern machine learning even to middle schoolers? Well, the interesting thing is that—thanks to the whole technology stack we’ve now got in the Wolfram Language—the answer seems to be “yes”! Continue reading

After a Decade, It’s Finally Here!

I’m pleased to announce that as of today, the Wolfram Data Repository is officially launched! It’s been a long road. I actually initiated the project a decade ago—but it’s only now, with all sorts of innovations in the Wolfram Language and its symbolic ways of representing data, as well as with the arrival of the Wolfram Cloud, that all the pieces are finally in place to make a true computable data repository that works the way I think it should.

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A Minor Release That’s Not Minor

I’m pleased to announce the release today of Version 11.1 of the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica). As of now, Version 11.1 is what’s running in the Wolfram Cloud—and desktop versions are available for immediate download for Mac, Windows and Linux.

What’s new in Version 11.1? Well, actually a remarkable amount. Here’s a summary:

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A Talk, a Performance… a Live Experiment

“In the next hour I’m going to try to make a new discovery in mathematics.” So I began a few days ago at two different hour-long Math Encounters events at the National Museum of Mathematics (“MoMath”) in New York City. I’ve been a trustee of the museum since before it opened in 2012, and I was looking forward to spending a couple of hours trying to “make some math” there with a couple of eclectic audiences from kids to retirees.

People usually assume that new discoveries aren’t things one can ever see being made in real time. But the wonderful thing about the computational tools I’ve spent decades building is that they make it so fast to implement ideas that it becomes realistic to make discoveries as a kind of real-time performance art. Continue reading

Note added 09/29/2021: Some information regarding Wolfram Cloud products described in this post may be outdated. Please visit https://www.wolfram.com/cloud to learn more.

Code for Everyone

Computational thinking needs to be an integral part of modern education—and today I’m excited to be able to launch another contribution to this goal: Wolfram|Alpha Open Code.

Every day, millions of students around the world use Wolfram|Alpha to compute answers. With Wolfram|Alpha Open Code they’ll now not just be able to get answers, but also be able to get code that lets them explore further and immediately apply computational thinking. Continue reading