MATLAB 2008b released

Next Friday will be March 14th which is celebrated by some as Pi Day since the date is 3/14 in American date format and the first three digits of Pi are 3.14 (as if I have to tell you!). One or two people have been looking for inspiration as to what to do for Pi Day in schools and I thought that it would be fun to write a Wolfram Demonstration especially for Pi Day, after all, my Valentine’s day demonstrations turned out to be quite popular . So the question that rem... more

I have been playing with the new release of Mathematica for a little while now and thought that I would share what I have found. Now, as indicated by the small increment in version number, this is a minor release and so we should not be expecting anything earth shattering. The sort of things that one expects in a minor release like this include things such as bug-fixes, small performance enhancements, documentation upgrades etc. So…let’s see what he have got. First on the list... more

Mathematica 6.0.2 was released back on February 25th but I have only just managed to find the time to install it.  I tried to install it on a brand new Dell 755 with a very fresh install of Ubuntu but near the end of the install procedure I came across the following error “The installer was unable to check for a valid password file.  Your Mathematica installation may be incomplete or corrupted.” I had not been given the opportunity to supply it with any licensing information s... more

1.Take one dare from Kathryn Cramer and obtain a picture from her website. 2. Steal ideas from this demonstration by Jeff Bryant. 3. Type the following incantations into Mathematica SetDirectory[”/home/mike/Desktop/random”]; image = Import[”kramer.jpg”]; xpos[x_] := Floor[x/N[2/374.] + 377/2.] ypos[x_] := Floor[x/N[2/499.] + 502/2.] imcol[x_, y_] := image[[1]][[1]][[xpos[x]]][[ypos[y]]]/256.; a = 1; b = 0.9; c = 1; Plot3D[{Sqrt[ c^2*(1 - (x^2/a^... more