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The Wolfram|Alpha Team

Wolfram|Alpha Blog: 2011 Year in Review

December 28, 2011 —
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It’s been an exciting year for us here at Wolfram|Alpha, and we wanted to say thank you to all of our loyal blog readers. We thought we would take a look back at 2011 by sharing some of this year’s most popular Wolfram|Alpha Blog posts. This year we saw some exciting content additions, brand-new ways of accessing and interacting with Wolfram|Alpha, and an arsenal of apps for students and professionals alike.

Each of these are only highlights of the blog posts of 2011. For a little extra reading, you can visit the 2011 archive to see all of the blog posts from this year.

January:
We released version 2.0 of our API, making it easier for for a broad range of software developers to take advantage of Wolfram|Alpha.

February:
For Valentine’s Day, we showed that even computational knowledge engines know the language of love.

March:
QR codes seem to be everywhere these days. Did you know Wolfram|Alpha can generate them?

April:
Wolfram|Alpha gained the ability to compute ranking and summary statistics about income tax rates in US states with the new US income tax data.

May:
We celebrated the second anniversary of the launch of Wolfram|Alpha!

June:
Wolfram|Alpha ventured into the microblogging wilderness known as Tumblr.

July:
We shared the ability to look up the moon phase for any date. What phase was the moon in when you were born?

August:
Wolfram|Alpha became interactive with the incorporation of Computable Document Format (CDF).

September:
Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, we shared the ability to look up data on nearly 108,000 public schools in the US.

October:
What would you do with 1,818 pounds of pumpkin? Wolfram|Alpha found a few options.

November:
What’s that in the sky? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Yup, it’s a plane! See what planes are overhead with Wolfram|Alpha.

December:
By incorporating Best Buy’s public APIs into Wolfram|Alpha, we provided a new kind of shopping.

In addition to all of that wonderful new content, we also released a slew of apps for iOS:

Wolfram Course Assistants

Algebra | Pre-Algebra | Precalculus | Calculus | Multivariable Calculus | Statistics
Music Theory | Astronomy | General Chemistry | Physics I | Physics II | Mechanics of Materials

Wolfram Reference Apps

US States | US Presidents | Words | Investment Calculator | Mortgage Calculator | Fractals
Gamings Odds | Sun Exposure | Flight Information | Password Generator | Tides Calculator

Wolfram Professional Assistants

Network Admin | Lawyer

Wolfram Personal Assistants

Genealogy and History | Personal Finance | Travel

What was your favorite addition to Wolfram|Alpha this year? Is there anything you would like us to cover in 2012? Let us know in the comments. Happy New Year!

3 Comments

I know quite a few people (including myself) tend to just type in a maths problem and just get the answer; so we just copy it. I would appreciate if you could have the “show steps” on more maths problems. Ones that you solve without “show steps”, I take a long time on my own to see how you got the answer. But I do learn on my own how to get the answer you got based on the material I’ve learned. Just a thought

Posted by Anthony December 28, 2011 at 3:52 pm

    in keeping with WA’s purpose I recommend that any of it’s output be made capable of expansion/showing steps until it gets down to its elemental data.

    A person weak in one area would follow the appropriate trail to compensate. This would not entail massive programming for every question but only WAs ability to treat anything in its output as a fresh query if asked to do so.

    BG Volunteer Curator.

    Posted by Brian Gilbert December 29, 2011 at 12:55 pm

Please consider making the CDF Wolfram|Alpha website compatible with Linux.

Posted by Lazza December 31, 2011 at 5:43 am