May 9, 2007–Released just last week, Mathematica 6 is already opening the doors to a dramatic advance in the concept of interactive computing. Using revolutionary new technologies at the core of Mathematica 6, Wolfram Research has now launched The Wolfram Demonstrations Project–an innovative website conceived by Mathematica creator Stephen Wolfram to bring computational exploration to the widest possible audience.

The Demonstrations Project is a daily-growing collection of open-code “mini-applications”–all created in Mathematica 6 and contributed by users from around the world. At its launch, The Demonstrations Project featured well over 1,000 Demonstrations, making it larger than any similar collection of educational Java or Flash applets available on the web–and much more diverse.

Topics span an ever-growing array of categories, from elementary education to front-line research. Some Demonstrations can be used to enliven a classroom or visualize tough concepts, while others shed new light on cutting-edge ideas relevant to high-level workgroups and thesis research.

Where before researchers and educators might have performed a calculation or generated an animation to understand results, it is now just as easy to create and share mini-applications to explore multidimensional parameter spaces on the fly.

“What was once in the domain of computing experts alone, is now in the hands of every Mathematica user,” said Joe Bolte, manager of The Wolfram Demonstrations Project. “We’ve introduced a radically new medium for publishing and development that gives researchers, educators, and professionals a rich forum to interactively communicate their technical ideas.”

All Demonstrations can be previewed on the web and downloaded to run in Mathematica 6 or Mathematica Player, the free runtime environment for Mathematica notebook (.nb/.nbp) files. Those with Mathematica can also experiment with and modify the code on their own computers.

For more information, explore The Wolfram Demonstrations Project.