Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

The Mathematica Story: A Scrapbook

Three Decades of Contributions to Invention, Discovery and Education

Donald L. Vossler, Owner, Lutheran Music (www.LutheranMusic.com)

In the mid-1990s I started a hobby of collecting hymn music from various Lutheran hymnals. I used Mathematica to create, categorize, and organize the various MIDI, MP3, sheet music, guitar tabs, audio, and video files. The collection has grown to more than 4,400 hymns with 250,000 associated files. In 2003, the LutheranMusic.com web store was opened to make the collection (now named “A Collection of Lutheran Music”) available publicly. Mathematica is heavily used to support the back office operations of Lutheran Music by automatically generating HTML pages, manipulating product lists, managing password databases, and developing new products using the hymn resources. Without Mathematica, it would have been impossible to create and maintain this enormous collection of Lutheran hymn music resources.