Wolfram Alpha

Submission 12,117

About

Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine created by Wolfram Research, which provides answers to factual queries submitted by the user using vast amounts of curated computable data and semantic indexing of text.

Features

Wolfram Alpha^[6] users can submit factual queries in a provided text field, which is then computed by the answer engine that displays any relevant visualizations and information. Queries can be submitted as natural language questions that are interpreted by the engine using the Wolfram Research Mathematica toolkit.

History

In 1987, British computer scientist Stephen Wolfram^[2] founded the computation software company Wolfram Research.^[1] On May 18th, 2009, the company publicly launched the answer engine Wolfram Alpha. On December 3rd, an iPhone app for the engine was released. On October 6th, 2010, an Android app was released on the Google Play store. On February 8th, 2012, the Wolfram Alpha Pro service was launched for a monthly subscription fee, offering several premium features including the ability to upload various file types and data.

Highlights

Reddit AMA

On March 5th, 2012, Wolfram participated in an "ask me anything" (AMA) post on the /r/IAmA^[7] subreddit. Prior to being archived, the post gained over 3,100 votes (94% upvoted) and 2,900 comments.

Fictional Character Curves

On May 17th, 2013, the WolframAlpha Blog^[3] published a post announcing engine's "fictional character curves," which can display graphs of fictional characters based on various mathematical formulas (shown below).

Wolfram Language

On February 24th, 2014, Stephen Wolfram posted a video introducing Wolfram Language, describing the project as a "knowledge-based programming language" (shown below).

Image Identification Project

On May 13th, 2015, Wolfram Research launched the "Wolfram Language Image Identification Project" at the website ImageIdentify.com,^[5] which attempts to identity the subject in any image submitted to the site.