Walking Randomly

The Wolfam Demonstrations project has just topped 4000 submissions! I make no secret of the fact that I love the Wolfram Demonstrations project and barely a day goes by where I don’t mention it to someone. It’s got so bad that I am sometimes accused of being a secret employee of Wolfram Research (I’m not – just for the record – but they are free to make me an offer.) If you are new around here then here is a quick summary of why I like it so much.

• Over 4000 demonstrations covering a very wide range of disciplines.
• Every demonstration is fully interactive and can be used for free via the Mathematica player.
• Full Mathematica source code for every demonstration is easily available. So, if you have a full copy of Mathematica then you can modify them for your own purposes.
• Everyone who has a fully licensed copy of Mathematica can contribute. This is a true community project.
• The guys and gals at Wolfram vet each and every one of the submissions to ensure that they meet various guidelines. If you are an author of a demonstration then they give advice on how you might improve your submission. Sometimes they even supply code that you might not have been able to come up with yourself.

In my opinion, the project really is all things to all people. For example, if you are a teacher then you might use some of the demonstrations to spice up your courses at no cost. Remember – you can download the free Mathematica Player and use all of the demonstrations fully interactively. There is no need to buy a Mathematica license! I often hear maths educators say “The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics.” and they are absolutely right! The Wolfram Demonstrations project gives you and your students another way to ‘do math’. Have you just taught some Fourier analysis? Well then, you might be interested in some examples of Fourier Series or maybe you would like to discuss (and demonstrate) Fourier sound synthesis. You might decide to demonstrate how the Fourier Transform can be used for image compression or maybe show the problems that Fourier series have with discontinuites.

If none of the demonstrations do quite what you want then download the source code and modify them. If you don’t have a full copy of Mathematica or the required programming skills then send a request to Wolfram and they may be able to help. Alternatively ask me – I’ll help whenever I can and have done so in the past both for readers of this blog and for teachers and researchers at my place of work (The University of Manchester).

If you are learning how to use Mathematica and prefer to learn from examples then the project is perfect. 4000+ real-world examples right at your fingertips. For free! I have used Mathematica for over 8 years now and yet I constantly come across new techniques and ideas by reading the source code of other author’s submissions.

Perhaps you are not a programmer or a teacher and you just like fiddling around with Mathematics? Again, the Wolfram Demonstrations project is for you. You might choose to play a relaxing game of Tangrams or challenge your brain with Sudoku. Alternatively you be interested in some of the mathematics behind prime numbers or perhaps you want to play around with polygonal numbers?

So, what would you like to see? Although there are over 4000 different demonstrations so far, there is still a lot of stuff left to cover. What is your personal wish list for the Demonstrations project? If you ask you might get ;)

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