Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

The Mathematica Story: A Scrapbook

Over Three Decades of Contributions to Invention, Discovery and Education

Charles Kennedy, Math Teacher

Congrats on a job well done. Yeah, I remember using Mathematica when you had to use DOS. I guess it was in the early nineties; I used Mathematica in teaching calculus at the first-year level. I wrote many programs, such as finding the equation of a tangent line. One interesting program I wrote was a model of our Lotto 649 here in Canada; you pick 6 numbers out of 49. The probability is about 1 in 14 million. I ran the program “buying 140 million tickets”—I would win the jackpot about 10 times. A very good demonstration.

I wrote many other probability programs to model many problems that were discussed in my finite math course that I was teaching. Other programs I wrote involved pi—for example finding your telephone number in pi, or showing that the digits 0 to 9 are equal in number for a large expansion of pi.

I have been retired for a few years now but I keep my subscription up to date. I sent a problem to some of your staff a couple of years ago that I solved mathematically but verified on Mathematica. Maybe this would be a good time to submit it again in honour of your 25th anniversary. Congrats again for all the pleasure I have gotten using Mathematica. I would loved to have worked with you 25 years ago.