4 ms·
Ask HN: does anyone here use wolfram alpha?
Do you use it? How often? For what?
I'm just curious.
- rcfox 16y agoI use it for solving equations, or graphing things.
- _delirium 16y agoSame here; I use it as basically a free web interface to Mathematica. I don't do any normal search on it.
- iamwil 16y agoOnce in a while. Someone asked what the average salary for teachers in new york were. I pointed her to wolfram
- buster 16y agoonly used it to compare companies profiles (shares, employees, revenue and such)
- pedalpete 16y agoVery rarely. I find it difficult to write my queries so Wolfram understands what I'm trying to get. In the amount of time it normally takes me to get the answer from Wolfram, I could probably have gotten the same answer through a bunch of different searches on google or bing.
- anigbrowl 16y agoSame here. It's wonderful if you know what data you want to work with and that's already curated in there, you can do all sorts of clever things. Browsing the datasets or creating new definitions/ search spaces etc...not so good. I fear Alpha is doomed to remain a glorified reference book.
- protomyth 16y agowhen I want specific data points about something (stock price, units, basic statistics).
- oziumjinx 16y agoI use it for humor. It's nice to view a site that received a TON of press/hype but never really took off in a big way. Kind of like Cuil... they are both good for an afternoon chuckle.
- quantize 16y agoI used it to check my answers on all my differential equations homework this last semester. I was excited to see it did fourier!
- srik 16y agoFor one - The 2$ ipod app comes very handy in school and saved me the ~70$ I might have needed otherwise to get a TI calculator for math class.
- rick_2047 16y agoI occasionally use it to cheat in math homework. Sometimes to figure out the way to reduce a function or to verify my answers.
- phaedrus 16y agoWolfram Alpha came out just before I started Calc II. I credit Wolfram Alpha as the reason I was able to go through Calc II, III, IV, and Differential Equations this year. I'm able to grasp advanced math concepts, but I have trouble actually working math problems on paper as math classes are usually taught: I understand the concepts and why we're doing things but I accidently transpose symbols, make algebra mistakes, and write down arithmetic wrong. I get distracted so easily that I'll stop and start 10 times on one problem because I keep forgetting that I'm supposed to be working on a problem, when an idea about something unrelated pops into my head. It's just the way my brain is wired - I don't think linearly, my mind is constantly going down multiple parallel threads at once like a Best Buy full of TV's tuned to different channels. I think I have severe ADHD and a very mild form of dyslexia, but I've never been diagnosed - when I was in school, teachers didn't understand that you can be both gifted and impaired at the same time, just in different ways. So throughout all my math courses it's been constantly frustrating to intuitively grasp the concept many times faster than the other students, and yet see them outpace me with rote mechanization while I struggle to not get the symbols in my equations mixed up. That's why Wolfram Alpha has been a godsend - I can use it as a sort of "debugger" for my math work; it helps me figure out where I'm making mistakes in my mechanical manipulation of the symbols. It levels the playing field.
- grinich 16y agoYou should really get a copy of Mathematica. The app combined with MathWorld is just fantastic. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ http://www.wolfram.com/products/student/mathforstudents/licenses.html http://www.wolfram.com/products/student/mathforstudents/lice...