Sorry, but that's not how commodities markets work. Commodity futures are not appreciating assets and neither are the commodities themselves. The contracts have expiries and are not long-term stores of value.
Just because something is traded doesn't make it an appreciating asset. In the case of commodities, they're typically traded as risk management instruments, not something that inherently provides returns.
Another way to express this is that a 64-bit value can express every combination of processors, so if you want to say something like "this process should run on these 12 specific processors" you can do so in a single 64-bit value.
I also interned at Wolfram in 2000. I spent the summer writing coverage tests, which meant getting to run Mathematica through gcov and seeing what lines weren't being hit by the test suite. Writing coverage tests for most things would have been incredibly boring, but this was anything but. There were lines of code that required me to spend two days in the Wolfram library reading up on branches of math I had never heard of before (wtf is a Gröbner basis?!). My favorite discovery was a line of code in the integer factoring function that I could only hit if I constructed a number by multiplying several Carmichael numbers IN A CERTAIN ORDER. If you like math and computer science, it's hard to imagine a better place to intern.
Sorry to hear about the rest of your undergrad experience. I was really fortunate that I never had a professor complain about me using Mathematica for everything. Even just typesetting math in Mathematica instead of LaTeX was a huge benefit for me.
One of my favorite classes was Computational Algebra taught by Dana Scott. He did the entire class in Mathematica. Each lecture was just him walking through a notebook and the problem sets were all about writing Mathematica code to solve interesting problems. I think I still have them somewhere...
That's a good way of looking at it. A couple interesting twists are that all the players move simultaneously and the combat is completely deterministic.
Just because something is traded doesn't make it an appreciating asset. In the case of commodities, they're typically traded as risk management instruments, not something that inherently provides returns.