Student newspaper of Illinois Institute of Technology since 1928

Math Club visits Wolfram HQ

By Pranava Teja Surukuchi
IT MANAGER

llT Math Club has been quite active
the past semesterl Last week, we had a club
sponsored trip to the Wolfram Technology
conference in UrbanaeChampaign, Illinois

The idea was conceived out of event
planning this semester; we were planning
on attending a conference and Wolfram
Technology Conference seemed like a great
idea We appreciate that we are lucky enough
to be at a university that invests in a site license
so we can have free use of Mathematica on their
personal computers!

We were not sure if we would be
able to go to the conference, due to budget
constraints and expensive attending fees,
but we were determined to make it happen
It took a lot of planning, going through red
tape, getting funding from financial board as
well as the Applied Math Department and an
extremely generous student concession from
Wolfram Research Finally, we were successfully
able to take eight members including Dr
John Erickson, the coeadvisor of the club, to
the conference To our pleasant surprise we
discovered that Dr Grant Bunker, professor of
physics and associate dean of research in the
CSL, was also attending the conferences

On Thursday, the Conference had
talks by developers and users of Wolfram

products on new technologies developed
by Wolfram Research There were also a
few workshops conducted to get attendees
familiarized with their new technologies We
discovered the depths of Wolfram products and
several fields of use that we did not realise were
possible

We had lunch with two llT graduates
who went on to become developers at Wolfram
Research We learned that the work culture
at Wolfram Research is different from other
companies This lunch also turned out to be
what can be called the ‘Zeroth’ meeting of
llTMUG (HT Mathematica User Group) with
the founders of the group present The lunch
was followed by even more fascinating talks on
Wolfram products, most importantly Wolfram
Mathematical

Thursday’s dinner was followed
by Stephen Wolfram presenting the second
annual Wolfram Innovator Awards given to
honor individuals who have made significant
contributions to their fields, through the
innovative use of Wolfram technologiesl He
then took questions from the audience about
existing technologies and his future vision of
the company His perceptions on the future use
of Wolfram technologies was quite diverse His
infectious fervor affected everybody in the hall

Friday turned out to be more than we
had hoped After a few talks in the morning,
thanks to Dr Paritosh Mokashi, developer at

 

Wolfram research and HT alum, we all had a
tour of the Wolfram headquarters The outside
of the ofiice was decorated with magnificent
artwork, all made using Wolfram products by
a dedicated art team It was only after we went
in and had an exp edition of the entire ofiice that
we saw the uniqueness of the company, from a
sand tracing pendulum in a senior developer’s
ofiice to the Stephen Wolfram Avatar Robot
made to have video conferences from anywhere
in the world We also had a visit with Wolfram
Tech support which employees has Pthl
holdersl We learned that the employees have a
unique chance of getting to talk with the many
world renowned scientists that rely heavily on

technewsiit.com

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Photo courtesy ofIIT Math Club

Wolfram technologiesl

After the tour of Wolfram
headquarters, we stayed for a few more talks,
had conversations with a few other attendees
who are notable people in their respective fields,
before bidding goodbye to the conference lnthe
end, we returned from the conference excited
about several new Wolfram technologies that
we cannot discuss, but we look forward to
sharing our new, found knowledge of the use of
the Manipulate and Dynamic commands, and
the functional and rule based programming
paradigms in general

 

New IIT Mathmatica user group available

By Utsav Gandhi
CAMPUS EDITOR

A new feature is available for students
who use Mathmatica: an llT User Group

Are you interested in learning more
about how to use Mathematica to do amazing
and useful things, or want to share your own
knowledge? Mathematica is a very powerful

integrated system for symbolic and numerical
mathematics, graphics, data analysis, statistics,
and simulation, with builtin data sources for
exploring realeworld (and realitirne) data from
many fields

Like the parable of the blind men and
the elephant, many people think they know
what Mathematica is, but usually they only
know a small part llTMUG is a way to find

out more

HT is fortunate to have a site
license that allows its use by students, faculty,
and staff, and even installation on personal
machines We (John Erickson, Math, and
Grant Bunker, Physics) want to assess your (the
HT community’s) interest in having informal
monthly meetings to share tips and techniques,
give brief presentations, swap code, and

showcase amazing Mathematica concoctions
from HT and elsewhere

If you may be interested in
participating in llTMUG, please email
bunker@iitledu or johnlerickson@iitledu
with the subject line “llTMUG’i If you have a
preference for (or aversion to) certain meeting
times, please indicate that also