The Web: WolframAlpha Takes Different Approach to Finding Answers

Many students may not know about WolframAlpha.com, a website students can use to help them with math equations, general knowledge questions, or even information ranging from physical science to organic chemistry.

WolframAlpha is a Computational Knowledge Generator that has a very user friendly interface. Even if you are not good at using a computer or navigating the Internet, once you get to the website, there will be a search bar where you can enter what you want to calculate or know about. Having this at your disposal can help you with almost anything you need to know and filters out all that clutter that you would find using a basic search engine like Google or Bing.

The website has an exceptional way of helping with mathematics. Any level of math can be used on this website, and it will provide a lot of varying information, depending on what you put into the en- gine.

For example, I entered “five squared plus nine squared equals c squared.” This gave me the answer to my c squared, which was 106. The site also gave me this plotted on an intractable graph, an alter- nate form and a couple different solutions to the problem.

If you “Go Pro” ($3.75 a month for students), there are a lot more features that can show you step by step procedure on how they graphed that equation, came to the al- ternate forms, and solved the equation.

If you were going to do research on someone and searched their name in this engine, then you would typically get a response that includes their basic infor- mation, like their full name, date of birth, place of birth, date of death, and place of death.

There would be an image of the person, if available, and usually some physical characteristics. A list of family relationships would be available, including the person’s parents, siblings, spouse and children and usually a summary of his or her life and major accomplishments.

This website is very useful for chemistry also. If you were to type in an ele- ment like Chlorine, Cl, you would get back nuclear properties, abundances, atomic properties, reactivity, electromagnetic properties, material properties, thermodynamic properties, an image, and also basic elemental properties.

All of this could come to be very useful as this information isn’t usually something the average college student may have mastered yet. Wolframalpha is a very handy website to have at your disposal as a college student, and I would suggest you give it a go rather than Google next time you find yourself stuck on something you may need to calculate or get more information on.