Wolfram Research, Inc. ( ) is an American

multinational company A multinational corporation (MNC; also called a multinational enterprise (MNE), transnational enterprise (TNE), transnational corporation (TNC), international corporation, or stateless corporation, is a corporate organization that owns and cont ...

that creates computational technology. Wolfram's flagship product is the technical computing program

Wolfram Mathematica Wolfram (previously known as Mathematica and Wolfram Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network ...

, first released on June 23, 1988. Other products include

WolframAlpha WolframAlpha ( ) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is offered as an online service that answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data. History Launch preparations for WolframAlpha began on Ma ...

, Wolfram System Modeler, Wolfram Workbench,

gridMathematica gridMathematica is a software product sold by Wolfram Research which extends the parallel processing capabilities of its main product Mathematica. Features gridMathematica increases the number of parallel processes that Mathematica can run at o ...

, Wolfram Finance Platform, webMathematica, the Wolfram Cloud, and the Wolfram Programming Lab. Wolfram Research founder

Stephen Wolfram Stephen Wolfram ( ; born 29 August 1959) is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer algebra and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical So ...

is the

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

. The company is headquartered in

Champaign, Illinois Champaign ( ) is a city in Champaign County, Illinois, United States. The population was 88,302 at the 2020 census. It is the List of municipalities in Illinois, tenth-most populous municipality in Illinois and the fourth most populous city in ...

, United States.

History

The company launched

Wolfram Alpha WolframAlpha ( ) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is offered as an online service that answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data. History Launch preparations for WolframAlpha began on Ma ...

, an

answer engine Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP) that is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions that are posed by humans in a n ...

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 Computable Document Format (CDF) is an electronic document format designed to allow authoring dynamically generated, interactive content. CDF was created by Wolfram Research, and CDF files can be created using Mathematica. As of 2021, the Wolfram ...

(CDF). 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 The Wolfram Language ( ) is a proprietary, very high-level multi-paradigm programming language developed by Wolfram Research. It emphasizes symbolic computation, functional programming, and rule-based programming and can employ arbitrary stru ...

as a new general multi-paradigm programming language. It is the primary programming language used in

Mathematica Wolfram (previously known as Mathematica and Wolfram Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network ...

. On April 15, 2020, Wolfram Research received $5,575,000 to help pay its employees during the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

as part of the

U.S. government The Federal Government of the United States of America (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States. The U.S. federal government is composed of three distinct branches: legislative, executi ...

Paycheck Protection Program The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) is a $953-billion business loan program established by the United States federal government during the First presidency of Donald Trump, Trump administration in 2020 through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and ...

administered by the

Small Business Administration The United States Small Business Administration (SBA) is an independent agency of the United States government that provides support to entrepreneurs and small businesses. The mission of the Small Business Administration is "to maintain and str ...

. The loan was forgiven.

Products and resources

Mathematica

Mathematica began as a software program for doing mathematics by computer, and has evolved to cover all domains of technical computing software, with features for

neural networks A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either Cell (biology), biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a netwo ...

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

image processing An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be displayed through other media, including a pr ...

geometry Geometry (; ) is a branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. Geometry is, along with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. A mathematician w ...

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, stru ...

, and visualizations. Central to Mathematica's mission is its ability to perform symbolic computation, for example, the ability to solve indefinite integrals symbolically. Mathematica includes a

notebook interface A notebook interface or computational notebook is a virtual notebook environment used for literate programming, a method of writing computer programs. Some notebooks are WYSIWYG environments including executable calculations embedded in formatte ...

and can produce slides for presentations. Mathematica is available in a desktop version, a grid computing version, and a cloud version.

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is a free online service that

answers Answer commonly refers to a response to a question. Answer may also refer to: Music * Answer, an element of a fugue Albums * ''Answer'' (Angela Aki album), 2009 * ''Answer'' (Supercar album), 2004 * ''Answers'' (album), 1994 * '' The 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(e.g., the ability to upload many common file types and data — including raw tabular data, images, audio, XML, and dozens of specialized scientific, medical, and mathematical formats — for automatic analysis) 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 System Modeler

Wolfram System Modeler is a platform for engineering as well as life-science modeling and simulation based on the

Modelica Modelica is an object-oriented, declarative, multi-domain modeling language for component-oriented modeling of complex systems, e.g., systems containing mechanical, electrical, electronic, hydraulic, thermal, control, electric power or process ...

language. It provides an interactive graphical modeling and simulation environment and a customizable set of component libraries. The primary interface,

ModelCenter ModelCenter, developed by Phoenix Integration, is a software package that aids in the design and optimization of systems. It enables users to conduct trade studies, as well as optimize designs. It interacts with other common modeling tools, inc ...

, 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

Wolfram Research publishes several free websites including the

MathWorld ''MathWorld'' is an online mathematics reference work, created and largely written by Eric W. Weisstein. It is sponsored by and licensed to Wolfram Research, Inc. and was partially funded by the National Science Foundation's National Science ...

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 ''American Scientist'' (informally abbreviated ''AmSci'') is an American bimonthly science and technology magazine published since 1913 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. In the beginning of 2000s the headquarters was moved to ...

'' magazine. However, by 2009, the astronomy site was said to suffer from outdated information, incomplete articles and

link rot Link rot (also called link death, link breaking, or reference rot) is the phenomenon of hyperlinks tending over time to cease to point to their originally targeted file, web page, or server due to that resource being relocated to a new address ...

The Wolfram Demonstrations Project The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an open-source collection of interactive programmes called Demonstrations. It is hosted by Wolfram Research. At its launch, it contained 1300 demonstrations but has grown to over 10,000. The site won a Pa ...

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. In addition, they have experimented with electronic textbook creation.

Media activities

Wolfram Research served as the mathematical consultant for the

CBS CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS (an abbreviation of its original name, Columbia Broadcasting System), is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainme ...

television series ''

Numb3rs ''Numbers'' (stylized as ''NUMB3RS'') is an American crime drama television series that originally aired on CBS from January 23, 2005, to March 12, 2010, with a total of six seasons consisting of 118 episodes. The series was created by Nico ...

'', a show about the mathematical aspects of crime-solving.

References

External links

*
Official Wolfram Research Twitter Account

Hoovers Fact Sheet
on Wolfram Research, Inc.
The Mathematics Behind NUMB3RS
Wolfram's site on NUMB3RS mathematics. {{authority control Champaign, Illinois Cloud computing providers Data companies Mathematical software Multinational companies headquartered in the United States Software companies based in Illinois Software companies established in 1987 Software companies of the United States