Math in the News
WolframAlpha Is Computing's "Best of What's New" in 2009
December 2, 2009
Popular Science (December 2009) has named WolframAlpha the top innovation in computing for 2009. Every year the magazine chooses the top 100 science, technology, engineering, and health-based innovations. The only criteria for judging is to "push past what we thought was possible," according to the magazine.
The publication noted that “A typical search engine is a reference librarian: Ask it a question and it suggests where to find the answer." Enter a few words into the Alpha homepage, however, and algorithms, scouring 10 trillion pieces of data, become the researchers, resulting in text, mathematics, graphs, tables, charts, and maps. "It is the impatient geek who overhears your query and leaps in with the answer," according to the magazine, which also profiles Stephen Wolfram himself.
Source: WolframAlpha Blog, November 12, 2009.