Hey guys, i found a link to this site from CNN. It's a very interesting new search engine for everything, mathematics, chemistry, physics, and damn near everything. Check it out. http://www88.wolframalpha.com/
A few friends and I in the office tried it yesterday. It couldn't provide you with anything when you searched for people's names. It couldn't tell me the distance between London and The Sea of Tranquillity. It could give me the 23rd Legendre polynomial along with plots of it and its expansions but that's just tying mathematica to a search engine. Not impressed so far.
It will make life very, very hard for freshman calculus instructors. Type in the hairy integral you can't solve, voila! the answer appears. Click on "Show Steps" and voila! homework is DONE! With zero learning involved.
My calculus teachers never graded the homework, they just assigned it and then posted the solutions a few days later. Homework is for learning how to do it. Checking to see if you actually know how to do it is what tests are for.
Wouldn't that distance constantly change depending on the earth's and moon's rotation and orbit? I don't expect it to be an interplanetary version of mapquest, able to calculate distances from specific features on one planet to another in real time.
I found these interesting: C4 E4b G4 B4 {{0,1},{1,0}} {{0,a},{b,0}} {{0,1},{1,0}} = {{0,a},{b,0}} {{0,1},{1,0}} . {{0,a},{b,0}} . {{0,1},{1,0}} = {{0,b},{a,0}} harmonic
It CAN, however, tell you the weather in Los Angeles on Jessica Alba's 18th birthday and it can tell you the meaning of life.
I typed this into Wolfram Alpha's search engine field: Why is WolframAlpha so slow? It returned: ? Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
I have been using it for the past few days and it looks solid but is still missing allot of information
