# Wolfram’s Alpha - a computational knowledge engine

By Murray Bourne, 18 May 2009

Wolfram's Alpha is quite amazing. It's like Google on steroids, and then some.

Try entering things in the search box like:

• Your birthday (I learned that I was also Born on a Blue Day — a Wednesday)
• The city (or country) where you live (I learned that Singapore's Gini Coefficient at 0.522 is much worse than Australia's at 0.305)
• A musical scale (I entered my favorite key, D minor, and it indicated the key signature, notes and what keys to play on the piano, but neglected to raise the leading note, C#)
• And of course, since Wolfram is the developer of Mathematica, it does a good job of doing math problems. I entered "integral x^5" and it gave the answer, drew a graph of the integral and even showed the steps for the solution.

There may be a new search verb for this. Mike Croucher over at Walking Randomly has coined the new word "walpha", as in "do a walpha search on the Airbus 380". Let's see if it catches on.

Go here for a bunch of example searches in Wolfram's Alpha.

### 3 Comments on “Wolfram’s Alpha - a computational knowledge engine”

1. Brent Yorgey says:

D natural minor doesn't have a C#. Perhaps you're thinking of D harmonic minor.

2. Murray says:

Oh yah - thanks Brent. It's been a while... 🙂

3. Ayesh says:

Dear zac
Im interste on Maths and brain
If u want to be work about it send me
Thank you
Ayesh

### Comment Preview

HTML: You can use simple tags like <b>, <a href="...">, etc.

To enter math, you can can either:

1. Use simple calculator-like input in the following format (surround your math in backticks, or qq on tablet or phone):
a^2 = sqrt(b^2 + c^2)
(See more on ASCIIMath syntax); or
2. Use simple LaTeX in the following format. Surround your math with $$ and $$.
$$\int g dx = \sqrt{\frac{a}{b}}$$
(This is standard simple LaTeX.)

NOTE: You can't mix both types of math entry in your comment.