Wolfram Research, Inc. ( ) is an American

multinational company A multinational company (MNC), also referred to as a multinational enterprise (MNE), a transnational enterprise (TNE), a transnational corporation (TNC), an international corporation or a stateless corporation with subtle but contrasting senses, i ...

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

Wolfram Mathematica Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allow machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimiz ...

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

WolframAlpha WolframAlpha ( ) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data. WolframAlpha was released on May 18, 2009 and is based on Wolfram's earlier product Wolfram Math ...

Wolfram SystemModeler Wolfram System Modeler, developed by Wolfram MathCore, 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 cu ...

, 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 Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allow machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimiza ...

, 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 science, mathematics, and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Ma ...

is the

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especiall ...

. 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 tenth-most populous municipality in Illinois and the fourth most populous city in Illinois outside the Chicago metrop ...

, United States.

History

The company launched

Wolfram Alpha WolframAlpha ( ) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data. WolframAlpha was released on May 18, 2009 and is based on Wolfram's earlier product Wolfram Math ...

, an

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

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 general multi-paradigm programming language developed by Wolfram Research. It emphasizes symbolic computation, functional programming, and rule-based programming and can employ arbitrary structures and data. It is ...

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

Mathematica Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allow machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimi ...

. 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, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified ...

as part of the U.S. government's

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

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 ...

Products and resources

Mathematica

Mathematica is technical computing software with features for

neural networks A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

image processing An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimension ...

geometry Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is c ...

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a bro ...

, visualizations. Mathematica includes a

notebook interface A notebook interface (also called a 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 ...

and can produce slides for presentations.

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is a free online service that

answers Answer commonly refers to response to a question. Answer may also refer to: * Answer (law), any reply to a question, counter-statement or defense in a legal procedure Music * Answer, an element of a fugue Albums * ''Answer'' (Angela Aki alb ...

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 SystemModeler

Wolfram SystemModeler 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-o ...

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

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'' 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 organized, open-source collection of small (or medium-size) interactive programs called Demonstrations, which are meant to visually and interactively represent ideas from a range of fields. It is hos ...

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 television series ''

Numb3rs ''Numbers'' (stylized as ''NUMB3RS'') is an American crime drama television series that was broadcast on CBS from January 23, 2005, to March 12, 2010, for six seasons and 118 episodes. The series was created by Nicolas Falacci and Cheryl Heu ...

'', 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