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If you missed out on our previous Wolfram Course Assistant Apps sale, you are in luck this weekend. Through this Sunday, October 2, you can save up to 50% in the iTunes App Store on all the Wolfram Course Assistant Apps.
Pre-Algebra, Calculus, Physics, Statistics, Music Theory, Astronomy, and many more powerful apps are ready to help you in the classroom! More »
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Diving organizations such as PADI® or NAUI provide certified recreational scuba divers with a dive table to determine how long a diver can stay underwater at a given depth, both for the initial and subsequent dives. The reason for the dive planner is to ensure that the amount of nitrogen your body absorbs during a dive remains within acceptable limits.
Dive tables do not tell you how much nitrogen has accumulated in your body after a dive; they simply tell you how long you can stay at a given depth without having to have a mandatory decompression stop.
Recreational dive tables come in the form of a plastic coated card, and for many recreational divers these cards are daunting and look very complicated. For example, the PADI® dive card has tables on both sides of the card, containing over a thousand numbers.
At Wolfram|Alpha we have removed the complexity of trying to read the NAUI and PADI® dive tables. More »
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We are happy to announce that today we are releasing two more Wolfram|Alpha-powered Reference Apps for iOS: the Wolfram Mortgage Calculator Reference App and the Wolfram Words Reference App.
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Thank you to everybody who submitted a photo as part of our Big Spikey on Campus Contest! We loved seeing all of the creative ways Spikey was used on campuses around the world. It was a tough decision, but we’ve finally chosen the best submissions. Each of the winners will be contacted through Twitter or Tumblr. More »
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Today we’ve got exciting news for students everywhere—Wolfram Course Assistant Apps are on sale in the iTunes store through this Sunday, September 18. You can save up to 50%! Physics, Calculus, Algebra, and many more powerful apps are ready to help you excel this semester. Consider this a back-to-school gift from Wolfram|Alpha! More »
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Learning all about the 50 US states and the history of the presidents of the United States is a pivotal part of the education of Americans. To assist people learning about these key aspects or those who want to freshen up on their trivia, we have released the Wolfram US States Reference App and the Wolfram US Presidents Reference App, both for iOS.
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Earlier this year, we added data on all 18,000+ US public school districts to Wolfram|Alpha, allowing you to analyze student and teacher populations and detailed revenue and expenditure data for individual districts or across all the districts in a given city or county. We had a terrific response to this—lots of people wrote in to tell us they learned some useful information about their own districts and others across the country. And virtually all of those people ended their messages with “But when will you have information about individual schools?”
We’re happy to announce that Wolfram|Alpha now has data on nearly 108,000 public schools in the United States, which is based on 2009-10 school year data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). So if you go back and try the first input from our earlier post on school districts, you’ll notice that the result looks quite different—the result for “Seattle public schools” now defaults to a summary of data on individual schools rather than the district itself (which is still available by clicking “Use the input as a US school district instead”).
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We’ve highlighted data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) database in previous blog posts about employment and business statistics. As many of our users head back to school, it seems like the right time to show off some additional World Bank statistics about education. Wolfram|Alpha can now answer a broad range of simple questions about student and teacher populations in various countries, such as:
- How many high school students are there in Djibouti? »
- How many grade school teachers are there in Africa? »
- High school student/teacher ratio in Japan vs. South Korea »
You can also ask questions about student performance and progression in a given country or between multiple countries:
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It’s back to school time again, and we here at Wolfram|Alpha know that a new school year can be expensive for both students and parents. Books, clothes, food, computers—it can all add up. That is why we’re giving away free stuff! Over the next two weeks, we will be giving away Wolfram|Alpha merchandise, such as T-shirts, mugs, and our apps, through our Twitter account. In addition to the two weeks of daily giveaways, there is also a chance to win an iPad 2 filled with our apps by participating in the Big Spikey on Campus Contest.
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While mathematics and music are inextricably linked, music is often regarded as magical. It transcends emotion and nature in a way that is often hard, if not impossible, to properly explain. For example, many people are deeply affected by the emotional power of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, but may not fully understand why. Perhaps great composers simply intuit mathematical connections to music.
But even music has plenty of structures that are clearly identifiable and thus computable. At Wolfram|Alpha, we are working hard to identify these underlying structures and are coming up with exciting ways to bring them to life.
Take a musical scale as an example. While we are used to arpeggios and melodic figures fluttering through familiar musical pieces, it is helpful to see that at its core, a scale has an intrinsic structure. Each pitch relates to the next by a certain measurable difference. Further, each of the pitches, which we perceive generally as high or low in a pitch space, has a specific frequency. More »