{"id":2584,"date":"2009-05-18T20:01:35","date_gmt":"2009-05-18T12:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=2584"},"modified":"2014-11-16T15:58:04","modified_gmt":"2014-11-16T07:58:04","slug":"wolframs-alpha-a-computational-knowledge-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/mathematics\/wolframs-alpha-a-computational-knowledge-engine-2584","title":{"rendered":"Wolfram&#8217;s Alpha - a computational knowledge engine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/\">Wolfram's Alpha<\/a> is quite amazing. It's like Google on steroids, and then some.<\/p>\n<p>Try entering things in the search box like:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Your birthday (I learned that I was also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/learn-math\/born-on-a-blue-day-summary-review-2362\">Born on a Blue Day<\/a> &mdash; a Wednesday)<\/li>\n<li>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)<\/li>\n<li>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#)<\/li>\n<li>And of course, since Wolfram is the developer of <i>Mathematica<\/i>, 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There may be a new search verb for this. Mike Croucher over at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=1292\">Walking Randomly<\/a> has coined the new word \"walpha\", as in \"do a walpha search on the Airbus 380\". Let's see if it catches on.<\/p>\n<p>Go here for a bunch of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/examples\/\">example searches in Wolfram's Alpha<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The home page: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/\">Wolfram's Alpha<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"alt\">See the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/mathematics\/wolframs-alpha-a-computational-knowledge-engine-2584#comments\" id=\"comms\">3 Comments<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here's a free online tool that will do algebra, calculus and trigonometry problems, as well as tell you what day of the week you were born!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[109,127],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2584"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}