Wolfram Alpha(an introduction)

Julie Starr | juliestarr.co.nz

www.wolframalpha.com is a computational knowledge engine

It doesn’t search the world wide web

It computes answers from its own knowledge base

It’s great when you want to add, subtract, multiply, square, compare, hear a chord,

see a colour, find out about fish production in France, remember past weather, imagine a

very big number and a host of other interesting things

Imagine you’re dusting off a piano and trying to remember a chord

Type in ‘D dominant 11th’ and Wolfram Alpha shows you the chord, notes, notation and lets you hear it

Wolfram makes maths a doddle

$250 + 15% = $287.50

d/dx(e^(ax)) = what Wolfram says …

… and it shows you the steps to get there

Wolfram can help you picture what things look like

by la

som

brae

nlap

ared

on

Flic

kr

by Oleg Alefirenko on Flickr

Type in 49 trecedillion to get a raft of figures that describe it

Type in ‘33g of gold’…

… and you learn its volume, sphere radius, latent heat of fusion and energy required to melt it

What makes orange? Ask Wolfram to add red to yellow and you’ll see. You get the rgb and hexadecimal too

How many pages does 6,000 words fill? Wolfram says 12 and it’ll take 100 minutes to type, 22 minutes to read

Type in ‘weather’ and a place and date and you get a snapshot of the weather that day

by darren131 on Flickr

Type in any date and you find out how many days ago it was and what time the sun rose and set

Search for ‘fish production New Zealand’ and compare it with France (add ‘France’ after ‘New Zealand’)

Want to know how long it takes to fly from Auckland to Wellington?

Type ‘Auckland to Wellington’ and Wolfram will tell you, along with the distance and local time and population

Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know as much about New Zealand as it does about other parts of the world…but it’s learning

Type ‘Raglan’ & you get information about a coat sleeve…

…but only a little about our small but celebrated surf beach

It has more to say about Auckland

by Light Knight on Flickr

Wolfram can give you ‘internet users’ in Europe

…and in New Zealand

It can compare websites of a certain size (using Alexa) – type in the url of the two you want to compare

In fact, you can compare any two things by entering them in the search box

Even apples and pears

by bootload on Flickr

That’s Wolfram Alpha in a nutshell. But it can do WAY more than that

http://www07.wolframalpha.com/examples/

It’s worth checking out this link for more examples of how to use Wolfram Alpha

The End

Julie Starr | juliestarr.co.nz