

Ask HN: does anyone here use wolfram alpha? - monological

Do you use it? How often? For what?<p>I'm just curious.
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phaedrus
Wolfram Alpha came out just before I started Calc II. I credit Wolfram Alpha
as the reason I was able to go through Calc II, III, IV, and Differential
Equations this year.

I'm able to grasp advanced math concepts, but I have trouble actually working
math problems on paper as math _classes_ are usually taught: I understand the
concepts and why we're doing things but I accidently transpose symbols, make
algebra mistakes, and write down arithmetic wrong. I get distracted so easily
that I'll stop and start 10 times on one problem because I keep forgetting
that I'm supposed to be working on a problem, when an idea about something
unrelated pops into my head. It's just the way my brain is wired - I don't
think linearly, my mind is constantly going down multiple parallel threads at
once like a Best Buy full of TV's tuned to different channels. I think I have
severe ADHD and a very mild form of dyslexia, but I've never been diagnosed -
when I was in school, teachers didn't understand that you can be both gifted
and impaired at the same time, just in different ways.

So throughout all my math courses it's been constantly frustrating to
intuitively grasp the concept many times faster than the other students, and
yet see them outpace me with rote mechanization while I struggle to not get
the symbols in my equations mixed up.

That's why Wolfram Alpha has been a godsend - I can use it as a sort of
"debugger" for my math work; it helps me figure out where I'm making mistakes
in my mechanical manipulation of the symbols. It levels the playing field.

~~~
grinich
You should really get a copy of Mathematica. The app combined with MathWorld
is just fantastic.

<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/>

[http://www.wolfram.com/products/student/mathforstudents/lice...](http://www.wolfram.com/products/student/mathforstudents/licenses.html)

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pedalpete
Very rarely. I find it difficult to write my queries so Wolfram understands
what I'm trying to get. In the amount of time it normally takes me to get the
answer from Wolfram, I could probably have gotten the same answer through a
bunch of different searches on google or bing.

~~~
anigbrowl
Same here. It's wonderful if you know what data you want to work with and
that's already curated in there, you can do all sorts of clever things.
Browsing the datasets or creating new definitions/ search spaces etc...not so
good. I fear Alpha is doomed to remain a glorified reference book.

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quantize
I used it to check my answers on all my differential equations homework this
last semester. I was excited to see it did fourier!

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oziumjinx
I use it for humor. It's nice to view a site that received a TON of press/hype
but never really took off in a big way. Kind of like Cuil...

they are both good for an afternoon chuckle.

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srik
For one - The 2$ ipod app comes very handy in school and saved me the ~70$ I
might have needed otherwise to get a TI calculator for math class.

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iamwil
Once in a while. Someone asked what the average salary for teachers in new
york were. I pointed her to wolfram

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rcfox
I use it for solving equations, or graphing things.

~~~
_delirium
Same here; I use it as basically a free web interface to Mathematica. I don't
do any normal search on it.

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protomyth
when I want specific data points about something (stock price, units, basic
statistics).

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buster
only used it to compare companies profiles (shares, employees, revenue and
such)

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rick_2047
I occasionally use it to cheat in math homework. Sometimes to figure out the
way to reduce a function or to verify my answers.

