Did everyone miss this? Wolfram Alpha now LIVE.

[Pal G.]

A new kind of search engine...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Enjoy,

PG

[Chuck]

I've been playing with it:

integrated functions

plot 2D and 3D fucntions

solved 2nd order differential equations

found laplace and inverse laplace transforms

create a star chart

found the atomic structure for caffeine

compared stocks....

and all on my ipod touch!!!! That's power, baby. And never ending fun!

[Katie Wasserman]

It does lots of mathematics to be sure and knows a good bit about physical proprieties of natural and artificial things but it doens't know anything about HP calculators not even stuff it should know about like CORDIC algorithms -- I'm very disappointed.

[Nigel Bamber]

Katie

Please excuse my ignorance but what is a CORDIC algorythm ?

Nigel

[Thomas Okken]

They're very elegant and efficient algorithms for calculating transcendental functions (trigonometric functions and others). These algorithms made it possible for the HP-35 to have a full set of trigonometric and logarithmic functions despite its small amount of memory. See CORDIC in Wikipedia for more information.

[Juergen Keller]

It is really smart i.e., it knows the answer to the following questions:

1) The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything?

2) How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?

:-)

And of course, it knows the answer to more serious questions...

Juergen

[Chuck]

...and if you've ever wondered how much wood a woodchuck can chuck....

of course I know this one already. :)

CHUCK

[Allen]

It does not know what to do with John 3:16. .. That's a number. hmm.

[BruceH]

Quote:

---

It does not know what to do with John 3:16. .. That's a number. hmm.

---

It should return this.

[Valentin Albillo]

Hi Pal G:

Really, really nice, thanks a lot for letting us know, much appreciated ! :-)

Its mathematical capabilities are really astounding. I've tried a number of examples I've concocted myself that some of you might want to try in order to see the nice results, just copy-paste each line in its turn and don't forget to use the "More digits" option:

1) solve LOG(PI^e+1491/505*LOG(x)^4)-PI=0


A nice symbolic representation and 4 roots, the real ones being:


X = 0.500000000051903

X = 1.99999999979239


2) solve (2002/X)^7+(2002/X)-71=0


Six complex roots and the real one:


X = 1093.00000007366+


3) solve GAMMA(X)-85/31=0


5 real roots displayed and among them

X = 0.3259999953+


4) solve X^5+X+6=0

5 roots (4 complex, one real), all of them returned in both numeric and fully symbolic form

Best regards from V.

[Namir]

Awsome site! I tried several examples for solving equations. Got the results I was looking for. You sometimes have to put the equation in a certain form to get the solution. for example:

solve log(X^4)-X=0

Does not give numerical roots, while:

solve 4*log(X)-X=0

Does give the two roots.

Namir

[Jake Schwartz]

It's funny....I typed in "googol" and it returned 10^100 in decimal, binary and prime factors, etc.

Then I typed in "google" and it returned the current value of Google stock and all sorts of info on the company :-)

Pretty slick.

Jake

[Frank Boehm (Germany)]

and some funky responses

http://www72.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wolfram+death

http://www72.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=alpha+beta

Well, if you are into maths, it's nice. If you need some statistic data tables, it's nice. For everything else, it seems to lack a bit of contents...