Welcome to WolframAlpha™. No need to download and install any special software or plugins, WolframAlpha (sometimes spelled Wolfram|Alpha) is a web site – not unlike Google™.
Use the following topics to learn Wolfram basics:
- What is WolframAlpha?
- Getting Started with WolframAlpha
- When to use WolframAlpha rather than Google
- How to Write Simple Queries
- Getting Financial Data
- Getting Medical Data
- Getting Scientific Data
- Writing Mathematical Queries
- Exporting Results
- Finding the Easter Eggs
- Programming WolframAlpha
- Problem Reports
What is WolframAlpha?
Let’s ask WolframAlpha what it thinks it is.
Go to the WolframAlpha site http://www.wolframalpha.com/ and type What is WolframAlpha? into the search box:
This is known as a natural language query –- it takes your English sentence and interprets it.
WolframAlpha responds, “I am a computational knowledge engine.”
How does this differ from a search engine like Google? If you type a natural language query like this into Google’s search box, you’ll get something entirely different – a list of web pages that match what you typed. For example, all the sites that match “What are you?” including links to the rock band The Who, Pearl Gaskin’s interviews, and images that contain the words “What”“are” and “you.”
Google crawls the web for its answer. WolframAlpha searches its own huge database of factual data to find the correct information and computes the answer from structured data.
Getting Started with WolframAlpha
If you tried the example in the previous section, you’re already started using WolframAlpha.
WolframAlpha is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, a British physicist and former child prodigy who, in 1988, created the Mathematica computer program used by scientists, researchers and engineers to perform complex mathematics using large volumes of data. Wolfram is also the author of A New Kind of Science, a paradigm-shattering work that has been compared to Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
Wolfram provides an instructional screencast video to help you get started. It’s well worth your time if you’re interested in using WolframAlpha. Watch it here. The WolframAlpha web site also provides numerous examples of how to enter queries as well as mathematical formulas into WolframAlpha’s search box. Watch it here.
When to use WolframAlpha rather than Google
WolframAlpha is designed to provide clear, straightforward answers to specific questions using natural language queries and equations. Google gives you links to all the web pages (often millions or even billions) related to whatever you type into its search box.
An article in UK’s Telegraph summarizes the differences, “a Google search, for, say, the nutritional values of a Big Mac returns 123,000 results which web users then have to sift through to find the facts they want. A similar search on Wolfram Alpha will, in theory, return a single answer, detailing the calories, fat content and salt levels in the McDonald’s burger.”
Let’s try it. Type Tell me about Big Mac nutrition? into WolframAlpha’s search box:
You get a complete nutritional breakdown of the Big Mac that goes considerably beyond the screenshot above. WolframAlpha gives you computed results such as average daily value ranking for protein, total fat, saturated fat, vitamin A, and vitamin C. It also gives you graphs showing the average highest nutrients compared to other foods, and tables showing averages for calories, carbohydrates, fats, protein, vitamins, minerals, and sterols.
Here are some of the graphs:
How to Write Simple Queries
You’ve already seen several examples of simple natural language queries. You don’t need to write complete English sentences, WolframAlpha (mostly) understands your shorthand. You’ll need to experiment a little to get your queries just right.
Here are some simple examples:
- Generate a map of Afghanistan: afghanistan map
- Find U.S. life expectancies: us life expectancies
(77.89 by the way)
- Do basic arithmetic: 534 + 1267
- Create a decimal approximation: pi to 1000 digits
- Make a graph of x3 – 6×2 + 4x + 12: plot x^3 –