Wolfram|Alpha on the iPhone

Since 1988, Wolfram Research has been selling Mathematica, a high-end computational software product that is used by scientists and mathematicians and sells for about $2,500.  For the last five years, Stephen Wolfram and his team have been looking at using the complicated math that can be done with Mathematica to answer questions by computing connections based on existing data.  A few days ago, this research culminated with the unveiling of the Wolfram|Alpha website.

Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine.  When you run a search on a site like Google, Google tries to find your search terms on other web pages.  Thus, a search engine works best when you are trying to find information that someone else has already addressed on a web page.  For example, do a search for “iPhone lawyer” on Google and you will find this website and others that address the use of iPhones by lawyers.  If you have a question that someone else has already answered on a page of a website, then you should use a search engine to try to find that website page.

When you run a search on Wolfram|Alpha, the site does not link you to other websites.  Instead, it tries to compute an objective answer for you by accessing a vast database of data and then it displays that answer using organized tables, graphs, charts and/or pictures.  Type in “What is the weather in New Orleans” and Wolfram|Alpha will report the current New Orleans weather and the historical weather in New Orleans.  Type “number of lawyers” and the website will tell you that just over 500,000 people in the U.S. are lawyers, 1 in 242 people, with a median wage of $106,100.  Type “father’s mother’s sister’s son” and the website will inform you that you are talking about your first cousin once removed, give you a helpful family tree graph, and tell you that your blood relationship fraction is 3.125%.

Wolfram|Alpha is interesting when it makes connections between sets of data that you might not otherwise think of.  A good example is the website’s ability to analyze a name.  If I type as a search term “Jeffrey,” I will see a graph showing me that the number of people born that were named Jeffrey started to rise around 1940, peaked around 1969 (which just happens to be the year in which I was born) and then has declined since then.  Then, the site takes a look at mortality rates for people born in the years that people named Jeffrey were born and computes that there are almost a million Jeffreys currently alive, 1 in 256 people, with a large number of us in our late 30s to early 50s.  Enter your own name in Wolfram|Alpha to see your own statistics.

I’m just scratching the surface of what Wolfram|Alpha can do, and I encourage you to check out this page to get more examples of interesting searches that you can run.  You can also click here for an excellent video description of the website.  I also enjoyed listening to the last 30 minutes of the latest This Week In Tech podcast which includes an interview of Stephen Wolfram by Leo Laporte.  And Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has a nice post with good examples of Wolfram|Alpha search terms.

So what does all of this have to do with the iPhone?  Like many of you, I often find myself using my iPhone to quickly get answers, whether I am looking up a name in my Contacts, finding a place on a map, or running search terms on Google.  Wolfram|Alpha provides another way to use an iPhone to quickly find answers.  Just go to the Wolfram|Alpha website on your iPhone and you will see an iPhone-formatted screen  UPDATE 12/3/09:  According to App Advice, Wolfram|Alpha no longer has a specially formatted iPhone screen.  Instead, when you access the website from an iPhone, you are encouraged to buy the $50 app to get an iPhone interface.  You can still use the website on an iPhone, but you lose the nice screen.  On the left is what is used to look like, and on the right is what it looks like now when you access the screen from an iPhone:

 

Type in some search terms and let Wolfram|Alpha quickly do its thing.  The search result screens are not specifically formatted for the iPhone screen, but they are easy enough to view in landscape mode and easy to read by scrolling back and forth in portrait mode. 

I can imagine being in a deposition and learning that the witness had five drinks in two hours.  Was he too drunk to drive?  Run the search “BAC 5 drinks, 2 hours, male, 180lb” and you will learn that his blood alcohol content was 0.11%, and assuming a legal driving limit of 0.08%, the witness should have waited at least three and a half hours before driving.

Wolfram|Alpha is new, so many search terms don’t give you useful answers, but
you’ll only waste a few seconds giving it a try.  When this website works, it works well, and I’m sure it will only get better over time.  Thus, I recommend that you keep this website in mind when you are searching for information, whether at your desk or using your iPhone.