Wolfram Research


Wolfram Research is a private company that creates computational technology. Wolfram's flagship product is the technical computing program Wolfram Mathematica, first released on June 23, 1988. Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram is the CEO.
The company launched Wolfram Alpha, an answer engine on May 16, 2009. It brings a new approach to knowledge generation and acquisition that involves large amounts of curated computable data in addition to semantic indexing of text.
Wolfram Research acquired MathCore Engineering AB on March 30, 2011.
On July 21, 2011, Wolfram Research launched the Computable Document Format. CDF is an electronic document format designed to allow easy authoring of dynamically generated interactive content.
In June 2014, Wolfram Research officially introduced the Wolfram Language as a new general multi-paradigm programming language. It is the primary programming language used in Mathematica.
Other products include Wolfram SystemModeler, Wolfram Workbench, gridMathematica, Wolfram Finance Platform, webMathematica, the Wolfram Development Platform, and the Wolfram Programming Lab.
Wolfram Research served as the mathematical consultant for the CBS television series Numb3rs, a show about the mathematical aspects of crime-solving.

Products and resources

Mathematica

Mathematica is a modern technical computing system spanning all areas of technical computing — including neural networks, machine learning, image processing, geometry, data science, visualizations, and others. The system is used in many technical, scientific, engineering, mathematical, and computing fields. In addition to the computational abilities of the system, Mathematica includes a unique and powerful notebook interface. Computational notebooks can be structured using a hierarchy of cells, which allow for outlining and sectioning of a document and support automatic numbering index creation. Documents can be presented in a slideshow environment for presentations and their contents are represented as Mathematica expressions that can be created, modified or analyzed by Mathematica programs or converted to other formats.

Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is a free online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from externally sourced curated data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might. Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field and Wolfram Alpha then computes answers and relevant visualizations.
On February 8, 2012, Wolfram Alpha Pro was released, offering users additional features for a monthly subscription fee.
In 2016, Wolfram Alpha Enterprise, a business-focused analytics tool, was launched. The program combines data supplied by a corporation with the algorithms from Wolfram Alpha to answer questions related to that corporation.

Wolfram SystemModeler

Wolfram SystemModeler is a platform for engineering as well as life-science modeling and simulation based on the Modelica language. It provides an interactive graphical modeling and simulation environment and a customizable set of component libraries. The primary interface, ModelCenter, is an interactive graphical environment including a customizable set of component libraries. The software also provides a tight integration with Mathematica. Users can develop, simulate, document, and analyze their models within Mathematica notebooks.

Publishing and conferences

Wolfram Research publishes several free websites including the MathWorld and ScienceWorld encyclopedias. ScienceWorld, which launched in 2002, is divided into sites on chemistry, physics, astronomy and scientific biography. In 2005, the physics site was deemed a "valuable resource" by American Scientist magazine. However, by 2009, the astronomy site was said to suffer from outdated information, incomplete articles and link rot.
The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is a collaborative site hosting interactive technical demonstrations powered by a free Mathematica Player runtime.
Wolfram Research publishes The Mathematica Journal. Wolfram has also published several books via Wolfram Media, Wolfram's publishing arm.
Wolfram Research has organized three Wolfram Science conferences in Boston, MA, Washington, D.C. and Burlington, VT in the United States in the years 2003, 2006 and 2007 respectively. Two other independent NKS Midwest conferences have taken place at the Indiana University, Bloomington in 2005 and 2008. Other independent workshops related to NKS research have also been organized overseas, such as JOUAL at the CNR in Pisa, Italy in 2009.
Wolfram Research hosts the yearly Wolfram Technology Conference in Champaign, IL. During this three-day conference, developers discuss the latest Wolfram technologies for mobile devices, cloud computing, interactive deployment, and more.
Wolfram Research also hosts the Wolfram Data Summit, a high-level gathering of innovators in data science.
They are experimenting with electronic textbook creation.