For those of you who are college students or teachers, you have potentially already heard of the online answer engine called Wolfram Alpha. If not, let me give you a brief overview of what Wolfram Alpha can do.
Wolfram research, a company founded in 1987 by Steven Wolfram, is a world famous software company. Mathematica, a sort of precursor to Wolfram Alpha, was developed by Wolfram over 20 years ago as a computational software program, and is used in many fields of technical computing. Wolfram Alpha uses Mathematica’s code to compute answers, as well as its own database from which is can answer a variety of queries.
Wolfram Alpha is more diverse than Mathematica because it can not only solve complex mathematical and scientific problems from user input, but it can give you useful information on almost any subject. Unlike Google’s search engine, Wolfram Alpha allows the user to ask very specific questions, and usually returns an equally specific answer (or rarely no answer at all, which is better than Google returning pages of completely unrelated results).
For example, when I type “How much should I tip on $159” into Wolfram Alpha’s search field, Wolfram Alpha returns a detailed answer with the amount of tip at 18%, and then shows tables with other standard tip percentages as well as the total bill with the tips added. Typing the same query into Google will not return any results that are nearly as helpful, and will even refer you to Wolfram Alpha’s page.
You should take advantage of this incredibly useful answer engine!
For more information, visit: http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html
By ITA, Seana Rothman