Seek Memory: Hello, WolframAlpha!

Monday, September 26, 2016

Hello, WolframAlpha!

Early this morning I watched Donald Knuth use WolframAlpha while pondering Pi in trees—which evidently relates to Banana trees, Spiders and Centipedes—in a YouTube video. That got my attention, but at the time I didn't feel I had time to finish watching Knuth's 16th annual Christmas tree lecture “Why Pi?”, much less start exploring WolframAlpha.

A few minutes ago, after yet another manic Monday, I met Stephen Wolfram on ted.com, shortly after learning that he developed Mathematica, or as Wikipedia now calls it: Wolfram Mathematica. (That also got my attention, and now I see my friend Kipp Johnson's taste in computing tools a new light!) While I was watching Mr. Wolfram deliver his TED Talk “Computing a theory of all knowledge”, I wrote my first seemingly trivial yet fascinating (to me) WolframAlpha program.

Here's my first WolframAlpha program and its output:

Now I have to finish collecting the garbage, then take out the trash!

O, The Stuff You'll Encounter!

Courses

Elements ← are you where this is

Exercises

Guide

Jazz

Beware The Bard

“If the subject of a Poem is obscure, or not generally known, or not interesting, and if it abounds with allusions, and facts of this improper, and uninteresting character, the writer who chuses the subject, and introduces those improper, and unaffecting allusions, and facts, betrays a great want of poetical judgment, and taste.”

—Percival Stockdale
(Radcliffe, "The Bard. A Pindaric Ode.")

The Programmer

“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.... Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself.... The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.”

—Fred Brooks
(The Mythical Man-Month, p 7)

Pages

Monday, September 26, 2016

Hello, WolframAlpha!