#stephenwolfram

[signaldigital]

Stephen Wolfram joins Automattic

https://signaldigital.net/2025/12/20/stephen-wolfram-joins-automattic/

automattic #wordpress #opensource #stephenwolfram #signaldigital

[frommicrotomacro]

[  computation  ]  S T E P H E N  W O L F R A M

Computing a theory of everything

[thefatherphil]

View this post on Instagram

#art #magick #meditation #okc #ontheroad #reading #stephenwolfram #new #science (at Mid-America Christian University)

[wolframlang]

21 of the Most Absurd Functions in the Wolfram Language

As a Hackathon Evangelist for Wolfram, I play around a lot with Wolfram Language. The language is vast, elegant and extraordinarily useful for efficient, innovative projects. Hidden within the thousands of functions that allow Wolfram Language users to make the magic that they do, are the funniest, eclectic oddball functions around. Check ‘em out:

Introducing 21 of the Most Absurd Functions in the Wolfram Language:

1. Skeleton Transform - Ever wanted to know when the skeleton pixel is its distance to the nearest background pixel? Well Wolfram Language lets you know - and we even get to use Grumpy Cat as our willing participant. Doesn’t he look the same after the transformation?

2. UpperCaseQ - Stop. Wait a minute. No way. Yes it is true. Finally, something that can solve a problem that was previously thought unsolvable - Is this letter uppercase? Yes, yes it is.

Okay I’m being a little too mean, this function might actually do something cool. Below is the letters of every language in existence that neither qualify as Uppercase nor Lowercase.

3. MeanFilter - Can we please bring grumpy cat back already?! MeanFilter, 

huh? Oh I see it blurs images to different degrees. Um think again and check below the picture

Yup, looking below the cat we see that MeanFilter also does some number stuff. So what in the world does it actually do?! I dunno.

4. FindClique - Yup even Wolfram Language wants to be one of the popular ones. This function locates the cliques in a set of connected data. Check out this epic example: Find the terrorist cells in the 1998 East Africa embassy attack network

5. OrnsteinUhlenbeckProcess - I mean everyone knows the Ornstein Uhlenbeck Process so I really don’t need to bring it up, but check out that sweet result: mu!

6. Beep - Well I don’t exactly have an audio recording to share, but yup does exactly what it says it does: beeeeeeeeeeep.

7. BubbleChart - BubbleCharts are truly essential. I insist on seeing graphs where it looks like someone upchucked all over it. Lot of stuff down in the 0.7 range if you ask me.

8. $MaxMachineNumber - How high can your operating system count? Yeah, wow. Let’s see if you can count that high.

9. SolarEclipse - Actually this one is kinda useful. Gotta remember to wear my sunglasses - er, bring a flashlight.

10. ButterworthFilterModel - Seeming so simple and innocent, so lovely and buttery, putting but the third lowest whole number known to man yield an absurd result crazy enough to scare off any but the most ingenious of mathematicians 

11. Riffle - Riffffffle! Great name, great function. Riffles any data set with the parameter of your choice. Riffle with Ruffles if you must.

12. FindPostmanTour: UPS! If you’re reading this you’ve found your solution to all your problems. The description for this one is: “finds a Chinese postman tour in the graph g of minimal length.”

13. TreePlot - If you’ve ever taken a computer science algorithms class, this function is actually great for visualization. Otherwise - “oooo pretty lines!”

14. InexactNumberQ - No explanation needed.

15. FromDigits - Help, I’ve accidentally put commas in between numbers I need together!.... Phew there is a solution!

Okay, being mean again. This function can be really cool when dealing in base X numbers.

16. Antialiasing - From the description “Antialiasing fuzzes out edges of graphical elements so as to avoid the appearance of jaggedness associated with discrete screen pixels. With Antialiasing->True, black lines may appear slightly gray. “ ... Black to Slightly Gray??!?!?!?! Noooooooooo.

18. SatelliteData - Where are those things flying!

19. GeoVisibleRegionBoundary - Even cooler, taking the above data, what region of the world can a satellite see at a given time? Don’t do anything bad when they’re watching!

20. Pruning - Ever wanted to trim the fat? Pruning takes an image and fills it with certain ranges of black pixels to make the image just show the important stuff. It reduces branches, and therefore “prunes” them. However my infinite pruning of this cool pyramid thing didn’t do much other than take away the line on the right. Oh well.

21. ChineseRemainder - Let me know if you figure out how in the world this all is calculated- beats me.

Well that’s all for now folks. Hope you were a bit amused but also a bit secretly impressed at the fast functionality of Wolfram Language.

I’m a one man Wolframpack, so please Find me a Clique,

All the best,

Max

[wolframlang]

34 of the Most Useful Programming Functions ever

As an avid hacker and participant in collegiate hackathons, I am always thinking about projects that I can build quickly and efficiently while still being unique. Whether you’re a master of 15 programming languages or just printed out your first “Hello, World!”, these functions in the Wolfram Language are going to make your life incredibly easy on your next project. What’s more, they will give you 100 ideas to create something that you never thought you could do in so few lines of code.

*To view and play with the code pictured below please Go Here*

Introducing 34 of the Most Useful Programming Functions ever:

1. PersonData - Thousands of people that are stored and real time updated. Click “Ctrl =” to enter in a name like “Elon”, “Musk” or “Tesla CEO” and Wolfram will interpret your string and attach it to the Entity it thinks fits your description best. Follow it with a property like “NetWorth” to learn more. A full list of properties can be found with PersonData[”Properties”]

2. DictionaryLookup - Access any dictionary in any language and look up any set of words. My search for “max ~~ ___” is for all words that start with “max” and end with anything!

3. Interpreter["EmailAddress"] - Create a rule that interprets whether an e-mail address is correct. Interpreter can also do things like correct IP address, street address, phone number, website url, etc.

4. Word Cloud - Need to have a beautiful visualization of data? The data below is a key-value word list of countries capital cities (the key) and their population (the value). Word Cloud will take a list like this and make the larger values show up bigger. No surprise that India and China have the most people. Can you spot the USA?

5. GeoGraphics - Okay GeoGraphics is awesome but takes a second to process. We can beautifully display any information about geography here. Ignore most of the gibberish and watch how I’ve put the flags of every country in Asia masked on top of its landmass! In this code snippet I saved flags as a list just like in Word Cloud but my key-value pairs here are Country entities (keys) and flag images (values).

*if you’re curious about the nuances of this - #1 = Asian Country Entity #2 = Flag Entity and @@@ means apply a function to the flags list which swaps out #1,#2 for each list value

6. ImageCollage - Take all the Oil Producing countries and display their flags bigger or smaller based on their population. Datasets like CountryData will recognize abbreviations like “OPEC”, “NATO” or even “G7”. In the Rule that we applied to the OPEC countries, it takes each one and ranks its flag importance (i.e. size) by population. Then we make a cute little collage of it all!

7. UniversityData - Another one of the great data sets. Look at how many cool 

things we can find out about any university

9. Export - Convert any file to any other by using Export. Lets first import the new internet phenom Grumpy Dog Earl. As you can see at the end of the URL, Earl is a PNG (I resized him to be a bit smaller - 100px width). Then I export him with the suffix of my choice and we can open it by opening the file either with SystemOpen or by navigating to your file directory and getting the file there.

10. FindFaces - So many epic ideas will come to your mind with FindFaces. Ignore the gibberish again but basically for each face identified a nice red box is applied to it. Looks at all those celebs!

11. MovieData - Speaking of Movie Stars, MovieData has some great information on any film you want if you want to create the next IMDB.

12. URLFetch - Headers, Cookies, HTTP Responses, Oh My! If you’re into getting information about websites and crawling, there is a whole suite of things for you. Look at the documentation on this sucker: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/URLManipulation.html

13. URLShorten - look up URLBuild too

14. InflationAdjust - If you had 5,000 British pounds today, how much would you have had the year that Columbus discovered America?

15. ChemicalData - You studying for a Chem Test any time soon?

16. CloudDeploy - Okay CloudDeploy is the bomb. This allows you to send any creation of yours to a clickable link (go to #28 to see how to embed your Wolfram Language creations in your personal website). Now if you go to the link (see below the picture) then you can see Earl in a link that terminates with and whose header is “dog”. CloudDeploy is tricky so look up in the documentation about how to send off API’s and Form Functions

Link: https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/user-874811a9-16a9-484c-9346-4513ac69bd23/dog

17. PieChart3D - Damn that looks nice. It is even interactive (if you play with it live) and you can click each slice to see what it means. Range[5] just plots 5 random slice sizes

18. Encrypt - Using OpenSSL you can encrypt and decrypt messages. Use QR codes, pictures of cats, anything you want as your key! Read more here.

19. SendMail - Hello from my little doggie Earl! Make sure to set up the SendMail options properly in Preferences -> Internet Connectivity -> SendMail on Wolfram Desktop.

20. ScheduledTask - These are really cool. Akin to a “If This Then That” product, you can easily have something running in the background for you. In the task below I’ve asked Wolfram to send me an e-mail (to my WolframID) every day for three months (change the stuff in blue to your liking) that has the daily temperature. The temperature will be from the location I send the request originally - unless I specify otherwise.

21. FinancialData - For all the investment bankers out there - there are some cool widgets you can make with FinancialData. Besides making easy graphs of financial data over time, Properties of FinancialData include PE-ratio (“PERatio”), Industry sector (“Sector”) and price volatility over a 50 day range (“Volatility50Day”). Do FinancialData[”Properties”] to see them all.

22. CityData - Michael Scott from “The Office” is one of 75,809 people. Can think of some cool uses of GeoGraphics with CityData!

23. LanguageData - So I love datasets, sue me! “LargestCountry” in this case counts for the highest percentage of native speakers in the population.

24. Manipulate - This function is super intersting and allows you to set a variable that you can change in real time. It is really fun for all things Math-y but also has some cool other ways of messing with it. Check out the code for the third place “Wolfram One-Liner Competition” in which Yves Klett had to make a program in 140 characters or less! Check outt he video of the result.

25. API Function - Even lazier on API Function - not even a picture! Trust me when I say that this is super important to any project you make so I’d rather you get your facts right from Stephen Wolfram himself: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/APIFunction.html

26. Sunrise - What time should I wake up on my next birthday in my home city such that I’ll be able to see the Sunrise? IDK, guess I’ll ask Wolfram. What if now I add a ScheduledTask to emit a Beep[] sound 10 minutes before sunrise on my birthday so I’ll wake up?!?!

27. SphericalPlot3D - Okay maybe not soooo useful but still really cool. You can represent symbols like theta with  “ /[Theta] “

p.s. if you’re still reading this post - I am honored but also ashamed that you haven’t thought of a million-dollar idea yet! Read the last few and then go forth and win at life.

28. EmbedCode - So you’ve made this killer widget. You’ve even cloud deployed it so anyone in all the seven kingdoms can see how epic it is. But you want to embed it to your personal website. Well, never fear Shakespeare because EmbedCode is here to save the day. Customize the HTML as needed, it’s a just a quick tag to get ya started.

29. WikipediaData - Okay this data set is lovely. Great for images (try “ImageList”) too. In this case though we take a quick trip over to Europe:

30. ImageKeypoints - This is where Wolfram Language starts to get beyond me! But you’re likely savvier than me and can do some cool stuff like this. See below stolen from the documentation. ImageKeypoints captures the pixels of an image that really matter.

31. TextRecognize - See ya later Adobe products. Add this within the Speak[] function to have it say the words out loud!

32. IFTTT - If This Then That, one of my favorite companies that allows you to make “recipes” for using things that happens, now has Wolfram integration with DataBin. You can put in any information and then use the Wolfram Language to display it.

Here is our selected IFTTT recipe:

text={{Text}}&user={{UserName}}&link={{LinkToTweet}}&at={{CreatedAt}}

Which Automatically save @BarackObama's tweets into a databin and then we generate a WordCloud of them:

WordCloud[DeleteStopwords[ StringDelete[ StringJoin[Values[Databin["5D6purWi"]]["text"]], {"http", "President", "Obama", "co"}]]]

Take a wild guess what has been trending recently on Obama’s Twitter?

33. SendMessage - Okay don’t hate me but I don’t have a Twitter so I can’t demonstrate this live but I’m told this works!

34. Epilog - Remember that cool 3D swirly thing we made earlier? Well with whatever graphic you might want to make you might want to tag it. Put some nice text on it or nice arrows or whatever you need! Use Epilog or Prolog

Wow you made it all the way to the bottom! Thank you for reading my good friend. Go make a dope project and hit me up at [email protected] (or if you need a rapid answer at [email protected]) for any questions you might have - I don’t bite and have all the free time in the world to make your Wolfram Projects a grand success.

“Staring at a computer screen for too long makes the whole world blind”                          -Ma-Hack-ma Ghandi

             -Max Greenwald

[wolframlang]

A Hacker’s Guide To The ̶G̶a̶l̶a̶x̶y̶     Wolfram Language:

By: Max Greenwald, with contributions from Bernat Espigule-Pons

Hey people, I am Wolfram’s new in-house consultant hacker tasked with the epic job of sharing this language with the developer/hacker community. Wolfram Language has so many built in functions that it can seem overwhelming to get started. Hopefully this post/listcicle will help speed up your on-boarding process.

Lay of the land: First time opening up a Wolfram Language document

Wolfram Language (WL) is a language unlike any other. It’s a terminal, live editor, compiler, and testing environment all in one!

If you don’t have a Wolfram Programming Cloud account, you can get a free one to play around with here: https://programming.wolframcloud.com/app/

WL files are called Notebooks, terminated by “.nb”. Open up a new one. On the right hand side of the page, click “Folder” make a new folder.

Create new files and navigate to different programs from within your program using commands like Directory[],SetDirectory[“foo”]. Click “Shift-Enter” simultaneously to execute a command. WL tries to predict what you’ll want to call next, click on the options for display. Go here. 

Hello, World! insert anything except Hello World here:

Do you really think I’m so cliché I’d ask you to write a “Hello, World!” program? You’ll want to cruise through here for a few minutes but if you want to see some cool stuff, go with natural language processing. Type “=” and then whatever you want. It should show up.

My second function call took the previous output using the “%” symbol.

Haha I just tried this and can’t believe it worked: 

Calibrate your oculus rift Wolfram Bearings:

Okay sorry now I’m just abusing my strikethrough privileges. Maybe 

strikethrough should be a cornerstone of the Wolfram Language.

Couple thinks to note. WL is a language that has an incredible host of functions that do just about anything you want. They all start with a capital letter. Type some random letters and click on the information button to start searching documentation.

As you get to build a more in depth project you’ll realize that you’re writing very few lines of code, but using a ton of functions. Don’t let all the brackets confuse you in this simple one-liner that spits out a random pokemon: 

EntityValue[EntityValue[“Pokemon”,“RandomEntity”],{“Image”,“Name”}] 

whose output produces 

… it looks better like: 

EntityValue[     

               EntityValue[“Pokemon”,        

                                "RandomEntity"        

                                ],

               {“Image”,“Name”} 

               ] 

Trust me use your brackets and tabbing carefully. Luckily if you haven’t completed a bracket or your braces or off, one of them will appear in red.

Time to take off the training wheels sonny:

In the great words of the prophetic Nacho Libre, “Let’s get down to the nitty gritty.” Below I’ve listed the kinds of things that will make freakin sweet additions to your hack project.

A. Cloud Deploy (https://www.wolfram.com/language/fast-introduction-for-programmers/cloud-deployment/)

All you have to do is wrap your program inside of CloudDeploy[] and it will instantly deploy and create a unique link that can be sent to anybody with your program in it. This is epic for quick user feedback and testing. Check out and refresh this guy.

B. iFrame Embedding and others (https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/EmbedCode.html)

Built a really cool function in WL but want to include it in a larger project or put in a cute little bootstrap-aided webapp? Done. Wrap your program inside of EmbedCode[] to receive something like this"

<iframe src=“https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/0e78b6b9-ccac-407e-b864-42425b032ce6?_embed=iframe” width=“600” height=“800” />

It is actually hard to copy/paste the iframe so download it and open it in a text editor for best copy/pasting. Play with width and height as you like.

Check out the documentation for Python and Java embedding too.

C. App please!

Your wish is WL’s command. Making an app requires literally no work. When you create the WolframCloud object (using CloudDeploy), it will automatically creates an app version of your project which you can see by downloading the WolframCloud app on iOS. For Android development, check out an example here: http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/313920

All you have to do is add the line 

Permission -> “Public” 

before the ending CloudDeploy bracket to deploy to iOS. See below the code I wrote for an app that detects whether a plant is poisonous or not by identifying an image of the plant.

Ignore most everything except the public permissions. Setting the AppearanceRules are kind of like the CSS for Wolfram Language. The IconRules just let you pass it an image to be your icon for your app and the string above that is the title of the app.

D. ImageIdentify: A whole new world.

Speaking of PoisonousOrNot, please try out Wolfram’s sweet ImageIdentify function that takes an image and returns to you an object containing what the image is. Heck yes.

Life Hacks: Keyboard Shortcuts

Anyone who has used Terminal in the slightest know the advantages of shortcuts. And anyone who ever said “don’t cut corners” has clearly never met a hacker. Here are my top Wolfram Language shortcuts:

a. Getting output: -“Shift-Enter” computes whatever line you’ve written (no need to do it until you want an output. Things highlighted in blue need to compiled with this command)

“=“ to type natural language, and “Enter” to compute it (“Ctrl-=“ put natural language inside of a regular function)

At the end of a picture or complex nested functions type “//FullForm” or “//TreeForm” … consider it a good  debugging tool

Jazz Hands: Make it look good for demo

I have no choice here but to command you… to use command. On a Mac hit Command-4 to be able to annotate your code with beautiful formatting. Command-3, Command-2, etc. all amount to really nice formatting options for headers, sections, highlighting code. Each time you hit that, look to the right side of the screen to see the little bracket which is called your cell. Type whatever you want in your cell and then click beneath to go back to coding or get another cool format to talk about your creation. I believe on Windows its Alt-4, etc.



Data Dropping the Bass: That extra boom that makes you love it all

One thing that especially makes Wolfram unique is having access to one of the largest accumulations of information on planet earth. Want to make an app about volcanoes? Wolfram knows every one and you can map them super easily (google search this you lazy bum - I can’t hyperlink everything for you). Want to mess around with the stock market? Wolfram knows the value of every stock in real time. I dare you to see how many Wall Street-y things you can learn by typing in FinancialIndicator[All]. Answer: like 80 different options. This just shows off the “SimpleMovingAverage” option. 

And don’t forget about data drop: https://datadrop.wolframcloud.com/ . In this bad boy you can add whatever massive dataset you want (HINT: go to http://www.data.gov/). Create something called a databin, upload your data, make an instant API and then access it through WolframLanguage. Like Hardware? Set up a ScheduledTask to record some data and then upload it to your data bin and right into your WL app (yeah - y’all are ready for the abbreviation now).

On your own junior: don’t forget to write home!

Okay there are a million StackExchange and other examples of how to do everything you need in Wolfram Language. But, just like Swift over Objective-C in iOS dev, Wolfram Language is newer, better and different than Mathematica, but there isn’t as much documentation. But never fear, Shakespeare, if you do your search queries for “Wolfram Language” but instead just search “Mathemetica”, then you’re sure to find what you’re looking for. Wolfram Language’s syntax is incredibly close to Mathematica’s so you’ll have no problem using what you learned and applying it to Wolfram Language.

 TL;DR

Use WL engine to create something you know you can’t do and embed it in your Bootstrap web app

Make a WL program into a phone app (android easy peasy, iphone even easy peasier) in seconds

If you’re having trouble finding documentation online, add “Mathematica” to your search, that code works the same in WL

Stay classy, HackDiego,

Max