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Solar eclipses have been recorded since ancient times, often misunderstood by early observers as a dragon eating the Sun or some omen of things to come. Although we have learned the true nature of eclipses in modern times, they never cease to amaze astronomers and the public alike. You can visualize solar and lunar eclipses using a Wolfram Demonstration. More »
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The world of colors is a tremendously interesting and diverse area, and accordingly, queries on colors have been some of the most popular and recurring queries in Wolfram|Alpha since its launch. In accordance with the popularity of the domain, we have recently performed a major upgrade to the existing color functionality in Wolfram|Alpha.
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When Wolfram|Alpha launched three years ago, it did so with broad (but not very deep) socioeconomic data for most geographic places on Earth. Since then, each enhancement of this part of our knowledge base has tended to address just one type of place at a time. Sometimes we’ve added an entirely new category (like US congressional districts or school districts); other times, we’ve added a narrowly focused set of properties to an existing category (such as age pyramids for countries or home prices for US metro areas).
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Since its creation, Wolfram|Alpha has constantly grown to cover more and more topic areas. Now, it includes some functionality that may be useful for people interested in lumber. Most of us are used to going into a local home improvement store and seeing large collections of construction lumber, but before it gets into those stores, it has to be cut from logs. An important step in the process is determining how much lumber can be obtained from a log of a given size. More »
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In spring 2011, while adding the finishing touches to my PhD dissertation, I decided to enroll in the Wolfram Science Summer School (then called the NKS Summer School). I never suspected that my project at the Summer School would lead to a job and my involvement in one of the central features of Wolfram|Alpha Pro. More »
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For the past few years, Wolfram Research has supported Bike to Work Day by handing out fruit, water, snacks, and other items to bikers at a station right outside our headquarters in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. This year we decided to include some data about biking to work alongside the granola bars and bananas. More »
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It sounds like the setup for a stereotypical horror movie, but it’s a true story: a lone traveler—the founder of a major software company and the creator of an innovative computational knowledge engine—driving on a dark and unfamiliar road. A rental car running low on gas. It’s the 21st century, of course, so he’s got GPS—but the last few gas stations it directed him to were shuttered for the night. Should he take his chances with the next station recommended by the GPS? Should he pull over on a spooky, moonless country road and try to call other stations in the desperate hope that someone answers his call? More »
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Who says data doesn’t have a lighter side to it?
Here at Wolfram|Alpha we are constantly adding data from the critical domains of science and socioeconomics and making all of it computable in order to provide new insights as well as novel ways of looking at the world we live in.
But once in a while we like to throw in something fun and exciting, and one such new area that we have added is detailed information on over 150 types of keyboards from all over the world. More »
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Today marks an important milestone for Wolfram|Alpha, and for computational knowledge in general: for the first time, Wolfram|Alpha is now on average giving complete, successful responses to more than 90% of the queries entered on its website (and with “nearby” interpretations included, the fraction is closer to 95%).
I consider this an impressive achievement—the hard-won result of many years of progressively filling out the knowledge and linguistic capabilities of the system. More »
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For hundreds of years, scholars have carefully studied the plays of Shakespeare, breaking down the language and carefully dissecting every act and scene. We thought it would be interesting to see what sorts of computational insights Wolfram|Alpha could provide, so we uploaded the complete catalog of Shakespeare’s plays into our database. This allows our users to examine Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, and the rest of the Bard’s plays in an entirely new way. More »
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One of the features of calculus is the ability to determine the arc length or surface area of a curve or surface. An arc length is the length of the curve if it were “rectified,” or pulled out into a straight line. You can also think of it as the distance you would travel if you went from one point to another along a curve, rather than directly along a straight line between the points. More »
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We’re constantly expanding Wolfram|Alpha’s knowledge base in small ways. Sometimes we know from the start that a new feature is going to be “blog-worthy,” like pro football stats or live aircraft-tracking data. Lots of other additions are useful, but don’t seem worth crowing about too loudly. We recently added some data on each of the 94 district courts of the US federal court system, and I confess that it seemed like a project in the latter category—but it turned out to reveal some genuinely fascinating bits of information about the justice system in this country.
Most people probably don’t have a natural sense of the jurisdiction of each court—or even how many there are in their state—but an input like “California courts” will give you a summary of key stats about all the district courts in a given state, including a list of the largest cities in each of them. From there, you can click a specific court to see a map of that court’s jurisdiction and detailed information about overall caseloads and judgeships, as well as annual filings for a variety of civil and criminal case types.
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It’s spring and I am ready for it. In the last few years I have come to love gardening and the general outdoors more so than I ever have in the past. Something about spending time in the warm sunlight, getting your hands dirty, and being in touch with nature is relaxing. I’ve found myself paying more attention to many green things around my yard that I would have previously just dismissed as a “weed.” Now I find that many of these things are not only beneficial, but in some cases edible. We at Wolfram|Alpha recently decided that we needed to beef up our plant coverage to include more than just, primarily, taxonomic information. Wolfram|Alpha now makes use of data from the USDA that includes information, mainly qualitative, that gardeners and botanists might find more useful. More »
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We’ve posted before about Wolfram|Alpha’s ability to answer questions about US school districts and individual public schools, and you’ve given us a lot of great feedback—and even more requests to expand and enhance our school coverage.
We’ve made a few significant improvements in recent months, including the addition of nearly 30,000 private schools to Wolfram|Alpha’s knowledge base. More »
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The latest version of our Wolfram|Alpha App for iOS just hit the iTunes App Store, and it comes with some exciting new features! Alongside visual upgrades to weather queries and the addition of links to purchase consumer products directly from Best Buy comes the biggest upgrade to our mobile app yet: using images as input.
With an in-app purchase of $0.99 comes the ability to use photos from your Camera Roll or pictures taken on the fly and input them directly into Wolfram|Alpha. Wolfram|Alpha can then provide analysis of your photo, add filters, detect features, perform color processing, and apply image effects. More »
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At about 6pm CST on March 6, there was a very powerful X 5.4 solar flare. This triggered a coronal mass ejection (CME). Indications were that the CME wasn’t squarely directed at Earth, but that a strong glancing blow to the Earth’s magnetosphere was possible. Here’s the data in Wolfram|Alpha for the flare:
There are two X-class flares during this time range. The effects of the first flare hit the Earth on March 7 and was a minor glancing blow, but caused a geomagnetic storm with effects visible in northern latitudes. More »
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In continuing our goal to create “An App for Every Course, and More”, we are happy to announce the latest in our Course Assistant series of iOS apps: the Wolfram Linear Algebra Course Assistant. Powered by Wolfram|Alpha, the Wolfram Linear Algebra Course Assistant will help you work your way through homework problems, ace your tests, and gain a better understanding of linear algebra concepts!
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Famed amateur astronomer David H. Levy once stated, “Comets are like cats; they have tails, and they do precisely what they want.” I’m a cat person and this seems to fit. Comets have a somewhat unpredictable nature to them, making it nearly impossible to determine how they will perform from one apparition to the next. This seems like a fitting description of cats as well, based on personal experience with my three cats. After recently diving into data on dog breeds, the natural next step would be to explore cat breeds.
Cat fancy is a rather popular activity, perhaps only slightly less popular than dog competitions. As with dog breeds, there are a number of accepted breeds that take part in competitions. We have gathered data from Cat Fanciers’ Association (CFA) and The International Cat Association (TICA) along with other sources to provide coverage on a majority of cat breeds.
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I get to show off the power of Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, and our other technologies to lots of interesting people, but last Friday was more interesting than usual, as David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister, came to our European headquarters.
United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron with Conrad Wolfram
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The 2012 Academy Awards will be broadcast this Sunday, and once again Wolfram|Alpha can help you settle all sorts of Oscar-related arguments, generate some cool trivia questions for your Oscar-night party, and do a few fun new tricks you probably didn’t know about.
Consider the list of 2012 best picture nominations, for example. Even among the front-runners for this year’s statuette, there’s a pretty big spread in general popularity and box office performance. How big? Ask Wolfram|Alpha to compare box office for Moneyball, Hugo, The Artist, and The Help, and you can see that The Help has earned more than twice as much as Moneyball and more than 6 times as much as The Artist (which has 10 nominations this year, versus 4 for The Help). More »
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Wolfram|Alpha has been steadily growing since its initial release nearly three years ago, and this growth is directed, in part, by the queries it receives. For example, the Wolfram Education Portal was created largely in response to the obvious demand for Wolfram|Alpha in the classroom. As a more specific example, we’ve recently enabled Wolfram|Alpha to respond to domain and range queries for real functions.
The domain of a real function is the set of real numbers that can be plugged in so that the function returns a real value. If, for example, we wish to evaluate f(x) = √(x + 2) / (x - 1), then we should ensure that x + 2 > = 0 and x - 1 ≠ 0:
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Are you looking for a great way to spend your summer? We are happy to announce the Mathematica Summer Camp 2012! Held at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts, students will have the opportunity to learn Mathematica’s language, apply their skills in other disciplines, and program their very own Wolfram Demonstrations! Students will also work individually and in groups to hone their Mathematica skills.
This unique, two-week overnight camp is designed for students entering their junior and senior years in high school. We look forward to seeing all the most talented high school students at camp this year! More »
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(Update: You can now find this data in the Wolfram Dog Breeds Reference App for iOS.)
Since prehistoric times, mankind has kept certain animals nearby for companionship, assistance in hunting tasks, and defense. Dogs are probably the most well-known examples of companion animals. This habit has continued to modern times and has resulted in a high number of dog breeds created for a variety of purposes. One modern convention is the concept of dog competitions. With the 2012 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show beginning today (more on this below), we thought this would be a good time to highlight some of the information Wolfram|Alpha has to offer concerning dog breeds:
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It’s a sad but true fact that most data that’s generated or collected—even with considerable effort—never gets any kind of serious analysis. But in a sense that’s not surprising. Because doing data science has always been hard. And even expert data scientists usually have to spend lots of time wrangling code and data to do any particular analysis.
I myself have been using computers to work with data for more than a third of a century. And over that time my tools and methods have gradually evolved. But this week—with the release of Wolfram|Alpha Pro—something dramatic has happened, that will forever change the way I approach data.
The key idea is automation. The concept in Wolfram|Alpha Pro is that I should just be able to take my data in whatever raw form it arrives, and throw it into Wolfram|Alpha Pro. And then Wolfram|Alpha Pro should automatically do a whole bunch of analysis, and then give me a well-organized report about my data. And if my data isn’t too large, this should all happen in a few seconds.
And what’s amazing to me is that it actually works. I’ve got all kinds of data lying around: measurements, business reports, personal analytics, whatever. And I’ve been feeding it into Wolfram|Alpha Pro. And Wolfram|Alpha Pro has been showing me visualizations and coming up with analyses that tell me all kinds of useful things about the data.
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Today I’m excited to be able to announce the launch of Wolfram|Alpha Pro—the biggest single step in the development of Wolfram|Alpha since its original introduction.
Over the two and a half years since we first launched, Wolfram|Alpha has been growing rapidly in content and capabilities. But today’s introduction of Wolfram|Alpha Pro in effect adds a whole new model for interacting with Wolfram|Alpha—and brings all sorts of fundamentally new and remarkable capabilities.
Starting today, everyone has access to Wolfram|Alpha Pro at wolframalpha.com. Unlike the “tourist” version of Wolfram|Alpha, though, you have to log in, and, yes, to get full capabilities there’s a subscription ($4.99/month, or $2.99/month for students). (Right now, you can try it for free with a trial subscription.)
So, what does Wolfram|Alpha Pro do?
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Remember that New Year’s resolution you made to lose weight this year? If you’re one of the many people around the world who pledged to get healthy and finally lose that weight, Wolfram|Alpha is here to help! Even with January behind us, there is still plenty of time to get back on track in 2012.
Studies throughout the decades have shown that regular diet and exercise is the number-one way to get healthy. Wolfram|Alpha can offer you a variety of different ways to start, track, and maintain your new healthy lifestyle.
Query how to lose weight, and Wolfram|Alpha will bring up a formula where you can enter all the information needed, including your intended physical activity level, to figure out how many calories you should be eating every day in order to reach your target body weight:
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Over the past few weeks, we’ve highlighted a ton of different ways that Wolfram|Alpha can help you explore and analyze NFL statistics. Neither team has a perfect record at stake in this weekend’s Giants-Patriots Super Bowl, but it still promises to be a tough contest and a typically over-the-top cultural experience—so in our final blog post of the 2011 NFL season, we’d like to suggest a few more useful stat queries, as well as some more unusual ways to use Wolfram|Alpha on Super Bowl Sunday.
First, the stats. The Giants won their regular season clash with the Patriots this year, and with the new game-level history plots we just added to team and player results, you can clearly see that the Giants’ defense put the pressure on Tom Brady that week, holding his passer rating to its lowest point of the season:
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Most of our users are aware that we release a new version of Wolfram|Alpha every week. Each version includes countless changes—including regular data updates to hundreds of sources, improvements to our natural-language parser and other core frameworks, and completely new areas of coverage. More »
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One year ago this week we sent out our first Wolfram Fun Fact! Since then, we have tweeted nearly 200 Wolfram|Alpha-computed facts, gained over 10,000 followers, and received some pretty amazing submissions from those followers.
To celebrate our first birthday, we thought we would share some of our favorite and most popular Wolfram Fun Facts from the past year:
round(log_12(vitaminC in a cubic light year of coffee/kg)))= meaning of lifehttp://bit.ly/hl98zt #FunFact— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts)March 16, 2011
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Wolfram|Alpha has become well-known for its ability to perform step-by-step math in a variety of areas. Today we’re pleased to introduce a new member to this family: step-by-step differential equations. Differential equations are fundamental to many fields, with applications such as describing spring-mass systems and circuits and modeling control systems.
From basic separable equations to solving with Laplace transforms, Wolfram|Alpha is a great way to guide yourself through a tough differential equation problem. Let’s take a look at some examples.
Wolfram|Alpha can show the steps to solve simple differential equations as well as slightly more complicated ones like this one:
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If you paid any attention to last weekend’s NFL games, you know that we’re headed for another Patriots versus Giants Super Bowl. We’ll take a closer look at those two teams next week, including prior matchups, head-to-head player comparisons, and performance trends over the past few months. But while we’ve got a slight breather in the NFL schedule, we wanted to show you a few ways you can use Wolfram|Alpha to uncover interesting stats from the 2011 NFL season (and beyond).
The Indianapolis Colts turned from a possible playoff contender to a team just hoping to win a game after quarterback Peyton Manning was ruled out for the year. Manning’s absence was a big reason why the Colts’ offense had a hard time scoring points. This bar graph clearly shows the Colts having the lowest point production since 1993.
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What rule gives the integer sequence 3, 10, 17, 18, 7, …? Wolfram|Alpha can easily find that this sequence comes from a simple cubic polynomial, -x3 + 6x2 - 4x + 2.
A different sequence, 1, 1, 3, 7, 22, 82, 333, 1448, … can be identified as the sequence of the polyhexes. After that, the input sequence of the polyhexes recovers the above sequence.
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Last week we announced our partnership with global sports statistics company STATS LLC and demonstrated how Wolfram|Alpha now allows users to access and compute football statistics using natural language. Since our original announcement, we’ve had a weekend’s worth of exciting playoff games. Miss any of the action? Ask Wolfram|Alpha about last weekend’s NFL games. Wolfram|Alpha not only returns the games and their final scores, but also provides a summary of team statistics leaders (and losers) across all four matchups. More »
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Teachers, are you looking for a new way to integrate technology into your classroom? How about through a dynamic textbook or pre-generated lesson plans? Students, are you looking for some extra help or practice in your classes? How about using interactive demonstrations and widgets to help understand the concepts you are learning? The Wolfram Education Portal is the answer for students and teachers alike!
We are happy to announce the launch of the free Beta version of the Wolfram Education Portal. The portal comes equipped with a dynamic and interactive textbook, lesson plans aligned to the common core standards, and many other supplemental materials for your courses, including Wolfram Demonstrations, widgets, and videos. The Education Portal currently contains full materials for Algebra and partial materials for Calculus, but will continue to grow and improve with your comments and feedback. More »
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Since Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009, we’ve often said that its knowledge base covers what you’d find in a pretty good reference library—and many of the new features we’ve highlighted over the past two and a half years have indeed been very reference-y: global agriculture data, public school statistics, species information, and tons of other socioeconomic, scientific, and mathematical content. Of course, Wolfram|Alpha has always been much more than a mere repository of reference data: we’ve made it possible for people to explore, compare, compute, and interact with all that data in unprecedented ways. More »
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There’s been very little change in top-level internet domains (like .com, .org, .us, etc.) for a long time. But a number of years ago I started thinking about the possibility of having a new .data top-level domain (TLD). And starting this week, there’ll finally be a period when it’s possible to apply to create such a thing.
It’s not at all clear what’s going to happen with new TLDs—or how people will end up feeling about them. Presumably there’ll be TLDs for places and communities and professions and categories of goods and events. A .data TLD would be a slightly different kind of thing. But along with some other interested parties, I’ve been exploring the possibility of creating such a thing.
With Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica—as well as our annual Data Summit—we’ve been deeply involved with the worldwide data community, and coordinating the creation of a .data TLD would be an extension of that activity. More »
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Finding the tangents and normals of a mathematical function or relation is one of the most common exercises in any calculus course. In this post, I’ll show you the newest functionality in Wolfram|Alpha for discovering and investigating them.
The simplest example of a tangent is the “tangent line” to a one-dimensional curve in the plane. Graphically, the tangent line is a line that “just touches” the curve at some point, so that if it were moved just slightly, this one point of contact would become two.
If you ask Wolfram|Alpha for the tangent line of a specific function and point, it gives it in both graphical and algebraic/numerical form:
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The next time you go stargazing, bring the power of computation along with the Wolfram Planets Reference App and Wolfram Stars Reference App for iOS. Both apps provide access to real-time data and the computational power of Wolfram|Alpha in order to perform advanced calculations and provide data on the planets and stars.
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What do your alarm clock, thermostat, coffeemaker, car radio, anti-lock brakes—and almost every other electrical and mechanical device you encounter in your daily life—all have in common? They are all examples of “control systems,” one of the most ubiquitous yet unseen modern technologies. A control system is any system or device that controls or regulates the behavior of another system. Using various kinds of sensors and actuators, these systems automatically control most common appliances, industrial processes, and even your body’s own biological processes!
Take your home’s humble thermostat. The temperature of your home depends on many factors, especially how long and how recently the home’s furnace was on. With a thermostat installed, the reverse is also true: the state of the furnace depends on the temperature of the house (it comes on if the temperature is too low, and turns off if the temperature is too high). There is a closed loop of causation formed between the home’s temperature and the state of the furnace. By design, the thermostat creates a kind of closed loop called a “negative feedback loop,” which tends to stabilize the temperature around a desired value. Most control systems are like this: sensors feed information back into the system, which is then used to decide on an action. More »
