To celebrate Nietzsche birthday let’s compute something relevant a bit to to the philosophy he founded, existentialism, and it’s Eastern counterpart (as some people think) – zen. Wolfram Function Repository provides a unique opportunity for the Wolfram Language users to publish their own algorithms and immediately use them from within the Wolfram Language. I have […]
Posts Categorized: Code
Idea-nets and uniqueness of US inaugural addresses
What is common between a symphony and a novel? They both progress linearly in time. This is why songs match lyrics and music so well. This seems obvious but comprehension of spacial objects is different. You can look at a two-dimensional painting and your sense of art is driven by the simultaneous perception of different […]
Who Owns the West? Federal Lands 2014
This map is a spectacular example of how data reshape public perception and knowledge. Very simple in nature it nevertheless shocks an average citizen by giving clarity to the data usually buried in obscure tables. East versus west, federal versus private, – the contrast is sharp and reverberates in the minds entangled with American history. […]
Computational history: countries that are gone
X – country birth | Y – country death | RADIUS – lifetime Mongol Empire The Mongol Empire existed during the 13th and 14th centuries and was the largest contiguous land empire in history. Originating in the steppes of Central Asia, the Mongol Empire eventually stretched from Eastern Europe to the Sea of Japan, extending […]
Interactive 3D Barth Sextic Surface
“The Barth-sextic is a sextic surface in complex three-dimensional projective space having the maximum possible number of ordinary double points, namely 65. The surface was discovered by Wolf Barth in 1994, and is given by the implicit equation: where phi is the golden ratio.” ~ MathWorld. We can write short Wolfram Language code ( by […]
Interactive 3D Calabi-Yau Surface
Wolfram Language allows creation of computational 3D models. These are different from those you can build with your own hands such as SketchUp etc, because computations are often intrinsically different from the way humans see and think. Let’s take for example Calabi-Yau Surface. It is a mathematical object and it is hard to imagine it. […]
Drug overdose trends in USA counties 1999 – 2014
The data Drug Poisoning Mortality: United States, 1999–2014 are published by USA government. In a few recent blogs (1, 2, 3) static visualizations of data were performed. Here we show how to animate maps of geographical drug overdose spread in USA. Below you can see 4 images, each reflecting upon Age-adjusted death rates for drug […]
Happy ASCII New Year ;-)
I can occasionally appreciate a nice ASCII art design. But the better is the design, the more manual and custom approach it needs – or so it seems. It is actually quite challenging, if you think about it, to transform a known image or shape to a limited medium using finite set of geometries. So […]
t * sin (t) = Christmas tree
Another code sample from Wolfram Community. I noticed that a discussion about programming a lighted Christmas Tree from a simple equation t*Snt[t] became very popular on Reddit. It is connected to a project a programmer developed. I thought how fast we can make it with Wolfram language? Here is the result with slight flickering 😉 […]
Dancing with friends and enemies: swarm intelligence
This post is based on a thread from Wolfram Community. The rules by Simon Woods are simple: 1000 dancers assume random positions on the dance-floor. Each randomly chooses one “friend” and one “enemy”. At each step every dancer moves 0.5% closer to the centre of the floor, then takes a large step towards their friend […]
Iconography for Elementary Cellular Automata Based on Radial Convergence Diagrams
My recent publication at the Wolfram Demonstrations Project: “Iconography for Elementary Cellular Automata Based on Radial Convergence Diagrams“. Consider a complete set of initial conditions for a finite elementary cellular automaton (ECA). This set can be indexed by integers using a Gray code or a binary to decimal conversion. During the ECA evolution, the […]
Complex numbers, beautiful surfaces and Mathematica
A few lines of code in Mathematica can produce beautiful images. Take as an example this simple but spectacular result of singularities in complex plane: Plot3D[Im[Sec[(x + I y)^4]], {x, -2, 2}, {y, -2, 2}, Mesh -> None, ClippingStyle -> None, PlotStyle -> Directive[Orange, Opacity[.8], Specularity[White, 20]], PlotPoints -> 50]