introduction to wolfram alpha
DESCRIPTION
A very brief introduction to what you can do with Wolfram Alpha.TRANSCRIPT
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