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Eric Weisstein

Math? Of Course!

May 13, 2009 —
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Some of you have asked whether you’ll be able to use Wolfram|Alpha for challenging math. Of course!

Remember your old friend pi?

Wolfram|Alpha computers pi to 100 digits


Or the power tower?

2^3^4^5^6

Or perhaps you’d like to do a little calculus (note that you can click “Show steps” to see how the answer was obtained):

integrate x^3 sin^2x dx

Or explore number-theoretic sums:

prime pi(10^6)

Or obtain eigenvalues (with a beautiful graph):

eigenvalues {{1,x,2},{x,4,2},{-1,x,x^2}}

Or consider the integral representations of BesselJ (if you don’t recognize a Bessel function as a friend, you might want to skip this example and look at the others below):

integral representations for BesselJ

If you’re interested in browsing some examples, in addition to the ones that were highlighted in an earlier blog post, check out Wolfram|Alpha’s Gallery of Visual Examples once the site is live.

For instance, Dini’s surface:

Dini's surface

And, from 3D geometry, Archimedean solids:

Archimedean solids

Of course, Wolfram|Alpha can help you access many kinds of knowledge that require less-visible advanced math to process—for example, checking the odds of a poker hand:

probability full house

So, as you’re exploring Wolfram|Alpha, you might think about the math you’d like to try there!

1 Comment

Great, a full house probability calculator! Could you guys also make some general pokerprobability calculators, that would be great ;.)

Posted by Reveillon Axé Moi August 5, 2010 at 1:35 pm