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June 4, 2009

Gain Knowledge or Educate Yourself or Your Children in Any Subject Online: Introducing Woflram Alpha, the Educational Search Engine

Filed under: Start-up Companies Reviews — admin @ 3:07 am

Do you need to know about something? How about helping your children with their homework? Does your child have problems with his or her math class? Well, there is something for you, or even for anyone who wants to learn about anything on any subject. Try this amazing new educational search engine, WolframAlpha. When you type in the WolframAlpha URL into your web browser, you will find a search bar with a guide about what types of entries you can put in and it can show you math equations, it can also give you information about geography in any part of the world, and you can even find out the population of any country and its capital in the world instantly. Use of this site is very simple and you do not even need to register yourself with this site. Suppose you want to find out about Georgia. This site works very simple. In the search bar, you type the word Georgia and hit the enter or return key on your computer. Georgia itself it too general for WolframAlpha and it will tell you that WolframAlpha does not know what to do with your input. There are two things you can do. First, you have a choice of subjects in a box below the search bar and if you don’t see what you are looking for. You can click on more options, and click on “Places and Geography.” Within this option you can specify more detail by clicking on any of the grey hypertexts below the main subject. For example, under Places and Geography, you can choose maps, geodesy, navigation, geomagnetism, geocoding, countries, cities, etc. What happens when you click on maps, well lets find out. When you click on maps, you will get general map information about any area around the world. Well, this is too general. Suppose you want to learn about Georgia, the country, not the state in the United States. Well, you need to specify the search. This is the second way you can specify the information you want to write something like the population of Georgia and Tbilisi. The first thing you will see below the search bar, you will notice that WolframAlfa assumes that you are inquiring about the state of Georgia in the United States, please specify a country. It will also continue to explain that Tbilisi is the capital of Georgia and describes its population. When you click on “a country,” you will notice that the population numbers for Georgia will change. When WolframAlpha assumes that the Georgia that you are inquiring about is a US State, it will show the population of the US State of Georgia and not the country as 9.364 million people. However, once you tell WolframAlpha that you want to know about the country Georgia, and click on “a country,” you will notice that the population number of Georgia will change to 4.4 million people. Notice that Tbilisi’s population remains the same as 1.049 million people. You can also find out what languages are spoken in Georgia by typing in the search bar “languages spoken in Georgia.” After pressing the return or enter key on your computer, you will find a whole list of the languages spoken in Georgia and the percentage of the people who speak those languages.

Suppose your child has a problem with math, like his high school algebra class. You can click a math equation in the search bar, such as if x = y and b=c, then what is a, and the result you will find again that this question is too general. Try something more specific, such as x=2 and y=3, then x+3Xy+x=z. After hitting the return key, you will find that the subject matter is mathematics and that these x=2 and y=3 are input. Click on any one of these highlighted in red and you will find that a graph will appear. This might not necessarily be what you are looking for. You can also click on +x=z, and you will find again information about slopes and other information related to Catregeon graphs. On the whole, this search engine can be used as a good educational tool for people of all ages.

Who is the brains behind this amazing website? This website is the brainchild of Dr. Stephan Wolfram, who is a well known scientist and is also an inventor, author and businessman. Dr. Wolfram’s most famous invention is Mathematica, which is an application that can compute, model, visualize, simulate, develop, document, and deploy any kind of technical project that one is engaging in. Mathematica is an integrated system that delivers and outstanding workflow and integrates everything into one powerful program instead of having different tool kits for different projects.

Dr. Wolfram was born in London and being a child prodigy, published his first science paper at age 15. Dr. Wolfram graduated from both Eton and Oxford Universities and then went on to receive his PhD in Theoretical Physics from Caltec University when he was only 20 years old. Dr. Wolfram has experience in high energy physics, quantum theory, and cosmology, some of his works in these fields are also known and taught in schools worldwide. In 1973, Dr. Wolfram started to work with computers and soared in the emerging industry, becoming a world leader in the field shortly after working with computers. By 1979, Dr. Wolfram began construction of the first modern computer algebraic system; which was later released into the market in 1981.

Furthermore, in 1981 Dr. Wolfram was awarded the prestigious McArthur Prize Fellowship, and at age 22, he was the youngest scientist to receive this prestigious award. More evidence of Dr. Wolfram’s achievement in science is his founding of the first research center devoted to complex scientific complex systems and published his journal covering the research in that field in 1986. Furthermore, Dr. Wolfram launched his first version of his famous Mathematica application.

By the mid 1990s, Dr. Wolfram continued to do his research and work on newer versions of his Mathematica application, as well as developing a rudimentarily new conceptual framework that would apply to new basic problems in physics, biology, computer science, mathematics, and other fields as well. In 1987, Dr. Wolfram founded the Wolfram Research Center, where he is still at the company as both president and CEO.

The investors of WolframAlpha and the funding history is not disclosed to the public, and WolframAlpha does have some competitors. WolframAlpha’s main competitor is new on the market and is the Zanswerz Knowledge Search, which was founded in April 2009 by Michael Dennis Smith and provides a similar service that WolframAlpha does.

WolframAlpha does have some competitors. One of the competitors is Zanswerz, which is also a knowledge search engine, like WolframAlpha and provides similar services. Zanswerz was founded by Web 2.0 entrepreneur, Michael Dennis Smith, who created many startups and developed many different websites.

For more information on WolframAlpha, click here.

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