It helped me learn calculus in university. It could take a given integration or derivation question and show the path to the solution in steps with plain English explaining what was done to achieve each. I like learning via examples and got a lot out of being able to consult more examples than our textbooks provided.

So did I but since they changed the input field on their website to the weird new “Math Input” UI, most inputs that would just work perfectly fine a year or so ago now don’t get parsed correctly anymore. It’s made WolframAlpha virtually unusable for me. No idea what happened there.

Maybe not in any meaningful way for our species or our industries, but I find it meaningful to me.

I use it to read scientific articles on subjects I don't know much about. For example, an article talks about a percentage of the population, but I don't know how big that population is. I can simply go into Wolfram and get the missing data. I can also use it to make comparisons with other countries or time periods and, with a few basic queries, quickly explore ideas.

I'm not a scientist, just a programmer with too much time and curiosity on her hands. For me, it gives me a better understanding of topics I was not trained in.

I also use it almost daily to find out the nutritional value of foods. "Foods ranked by vitamin A", "Proteins in 100g of broccoli", etc.

I use it for a bunch of small questions:

1. Calculations wrt inflation: “$1000 1975 in 2021”

2. Draw a mathematical equation: “(x^2 + y^2 -1)^3 -x^2y^3 <0”

3. Computations with visualisation: “area under y=x^2 from 1 to 3”

4. Bitrate calculations: “1.5TB at 10mbps”

5. Compare weather/climate between cities: “compare weather brussels and cape town”

I use ddg as search engine, so can just add !wa to the query and ddg will redirect it to Wolfram Alpha. I don’t use it very often but love how quickly it can answer most problems.

I find myself doing unit queries like 4 all the time. "80 bytes / second * 1 year" results in ~2.5 GB. Etc etc. It's very convenient for making sure that you're handling units correctly.

It's also really good for random facts. For example, "75 kWh at California electricity price". Or if you know something takes 20W to run continuously and you want to know how much it costs... "20 W * 1 year at california electricity price".

There’s a fun estimation technique from Programming Pearls: pi seconds is a nano century. So, 3.14e7 seconds in a year.

    80 bytes/sec * 3.14e7 sec = 2.4e9 bytes

http://wordaligned.org/articles/pi-seconds

I think it's the backend for a bunch of Alexa queries.

It appears you are correct, this was revealed in 2018:

https://voicebot.ai/2018/12/27/wolfram-alpha-makes-alexa-sma...

Generating z-scores for weird probability distributions

Spoilers: Turns out `c * (ax + b)^-(ax + b) + d` has some really nice numerical shortcuts/ratios for z-score calculations

What scenario gave rise to that distribution?!

A few years ago it was the only tool I could find that could answer questions like "show me every college within 100 km of this point".

I haven't needed to do anything like that since. But it is yet another example of how I think Google maps and similar are weak junk only good for finding coffee shops.

Using it when estimating with query like "today plus 30 working days"

Same here, I uses it for hours and minutes.

I do time zone queries for scheduling meetings. I have DuckDuckGo as the search engine for my browser.

Typing

!wa 2pm Berlin time in New Delhi

Is super useful and answered by Wolfram.

FWIW, Google can answer this exact query faster than Wolfram Alpha can. Google will have the answer before Wolfram Alpha even loads.

Today I had to quickly compare trade import and export as percentage of GDP in two countries. I could basically write: (country) export and import as percentage of (country) GDP vs [repeated for country 2]. It worked in first go in WA, no issues, even produced a beautiful graph. That runs rings around Google.

Definitely, Wolfram Alpha can do way, way more than Google can. I just mean that the simple time zone conversion is one of the things Google can do; it's not a super ringing endorsement for Wolfram Alpha to be doing time zone conversions with it. Also not a ringing endorsement for DDG -- if he had used Google it would have just answered his query inline without having to use a special exclamation point query.

Taking google's answer for things they're calculating with math is probably safe, but if you get into the habit of reading google's answers to queries it will have you believing a lot of nonsense because many of the answers google offers are not calculated at all, but instead are regurgitated nonsense that google read on the internet and took at face value (example from Technology Connections: https://youtu.be/TbHBHhZOglw?t=58)

I assume the GP is referring to the instant answers it gives you in a white box separate from search results. In this instance it is calculated by google and not crawled from the web.

Those instant answers are the ones I'm talking about. Sometimes they're calculated, but often they're regurgitated from web crawls and the UI doesn't clearly differentiate the two.

You can tell the ones that are calculated because they have a "Feedback" link and no source link.

I use it for computing integrals / solving ODEs when I don't have access to one of the CAS's I know how to use. It's nice to get a quick answer and not have to remember syntax, since I only have this problem about once every six months or so.

are you sure you are not referring to Mathematica or taking derivatives? ODEs and integrals are hard to solve for even simple cases, I cannot imagine wolfram alpha being able to solve anything even remotely complicated without throwing an error.

Siri uses it for answers to some questions (or used to). For example if you ask Siri what planes are overhead it used WolframAlpha to get that information.

yep. endless fun at parties!

"oh, your phone has siri? watch this: hey siri! what's the distance between the earth and the sun divided by the population of new zealand?"

Good for simple stuff, but anything too complicated will generate one of the following two messages:

"computation time exceeded"

"does not understand your input"

It helped me go through all highschool math exams

I use it to do random calculations like how much something weighs/costs that is combining units in various fields and pulling data from static and dynamic sources for commodity materials, e.g. microns * inches * yards * density of iron * cost of iron

I mostly use it for unit conversions in equations. It's very handy, though sadly requires access to the internet and is sometimes rather slow.

`units` works too, but doesn't do the same job of solving equations.

You want `qalc`. :)

Designing periodic procedural textures for 3D graphics. The WA interface is more straightforward than the software I was using. I still like it for that purpose.

WolframAlpha is behind a lot of Siri answers.

Wait you mean asking: "how many turkeys are in turkey doesn't count as meaningful?"

The WA query “Planes overhead” is very useful.