Things Engineers Like: Wolfram Alpha

As an engineer, you're bound to deal with formulas and numbers. You probably are infatuated with numbers and formulas and can't get enough of them. Well, until it's 4am and you are sick and tired of better numbers and variables into 2 page long equations and it's going in circles. But for the most part, it's a love-love relationship between engineers and numbers.

If you are in college as an engineer, you already love Wolfram Alpha. If not, get on it right now! Use THIS! It may be the most useful tool that you can have at all times if you have the Internet. Naturally, it can do simple equation solving. But it can do so much more. It does the conversions to radians/degrees without additional input, handles transfer functions, expanded forms of equations (Useful for transfer functions), finds roots, derivatives, integrals, series expansions, graphs, and so much more. It is absolutely ridiculous what it can do. It's difficult to find things it can't do if you input your search correctly.

While it is useful (how comes the teacher in me), it is important to learn how Wolfram Alpha got to the information provided. Only the final solution is shown, so it'll be difficult to see how it was solved without learning the material. But it is certainly a good method of checking your answers. Sometimes it's better to reverse engineer it and see how it works.

But Wolfram Alpha isn't loved but millions just because of the number and equation crunching it does. It does so much more. For instance, I searched my birthday and I find out I am 8205 days old. FW de Klerk freed prisoners on that day too. On that Sunday night, it was a waning gibbous moon and the cutest baby in the world was born. It seems like Wolfram knows all, at the very least it provides interesting analysis and information related to the search. It even knows stats for websites, for example try searching "Google.com".

It's so powerful that Apple has integrated into their voice command service, Siri. And of course there are mobile apps for it too. Instantly increasing the usefulness and power of mobile devices especially since all of the computation is not done on the local side.

And of course, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42. But the people at Wolfram may change that soon.