Wolfram accepts demonstrations “Design by Visualign”

To promote its new Computable Document Format (CDF), Wolfram Research, the company behind the powerful computing platform Mathematica, has created an online Demonstrations project. Mathematica allows to create dynamic, interactive visualizations. Those models can be packaged as ‘demonstrations’ and embedded in websites. Users can thus interact with the underlying model – leveraging the computational power of Mathematica – through a CDF player, which can be downloaded for free and need to be installed once. (This is similar to Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight or other Plug-In architectures.)

On the official website of the Demonstrations project Wolfram Research invites submissions and provides feedback before deciding whether to publish the submitted demonstration. As of this writing there are some 7600+ demonstrations live, many of them with stunning visualizations in such diverse topics as Systems, Models, Business & Social Systems, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and others. For the developer community this is very useful as the source code to all demonstrations is available for download. For the business and scientific community this is useful to get a feel for the kinds of possible models.

We have contributed several visualizations which have been published here. When it comes to the power of interactive, dynamic visualizations, one has to experience them to truly appreciate their impact. It is said that “seeing is believing”. One could go a step further and say “interacting is understanding”. See also our Blog for more on CDF technology.