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Jon McLoone

Wolfram Research Gets Visit from United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron

February 27, 2012 —
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I get to show off the power of Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, and our other technologies to lots of interesting people, but last Friday was more interesting than usual, as David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister, came to our European headquarters.

United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron with Conrad Wolfram

United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron with Conrad Wolfram

We have been growing consistently, and our UK location finally ran out of room for the extra staff that we were hiring, so we built a brand new set of offices on a former film studio site (I am told an underwater scene from one of the Superman movies was filmed under my office location). The Prime Minister came to perform the official opening.

Cameron did a TED Talk about the democratizing potential of using technology to drive accountability and transparency of government, so I was keen to show him some Wolfram|Alpha examples on crime, the economy, energy, and health, and we talked about the potential that it offered. We also talked about our ComputerBasedMath.org project to build a completely new math curriculum with computer-based computation at its heart.

One dilemma presented was how to signify the opening. Cutting ribbons or pulling curtains back on a plaque seemed rather old fashioned, so we fed some live Wolfram|Alpha data into a virtual plaque, which was dynamically generated on our wall-mounted monitor as the Prime Minister touched an iPad screen.

Here is the image with the “facts of the moment” as generated by David Cameron:

Moment of Official Opening by Prime Minister David Cameron

For a little more on the visit, go to ConradWolfram.com.

2 Comments

I have just checked for what says WolframAlpha about “Wolfram Mathematica” to know if you have already curated this portion of knowledge about your own company (endevour) and what it says is very limited.

I left an entry that could be the same to put overhere. I would have been really nice to show in your “facts of the moment” your inmenses capabilities compared to what Mathematica was possible in version 1.0 to name a few….

In any case, it is fantastic to have this visit and the support of your Prime Minister.

Thanks,
Carlos.

Posted by Carlos February 28, 2012 at 9:35 am

Why, why, why is it that I can get an estimate of the airspeed velocity of an unladen european swallow but not an african (any species)? I am almost disappointed. Almost, it was still a nice break from homework.

Posted by marcus czapla February 29, 2012 at 12:47 am