Wolfram|Alpha

For those that haven't heard yet. Check out:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

This is a "search engine" of sorts. However, instead of searching for youtube videos, company info, or the latest tech, this engine is purely computational. Wolfram|Alpha was made by the same genius that designed "Mathematica", a popular and powerful math tool to solve all sorts of math related problems.


Currently, I don't fully understand its capabilities, but I do recognize it as a very useful tool. Here are some examples:

• Say you search for "Jonathan", my first name. It will return a very nice statistical overview of that name, informing you of its decline in popularity in US births in 1990 and an estimated age distribution.
• Say you search for "Durham, NH". It will return information about Durham such as population, current local time, longitude and latitude, current weather conditions, and distance to popular larger cities.
• Say you search for "sin(x)/x". It will return all sorts of information about the expression. First giving you some nice plots of the function, the derivative, the integral, the series expansion, and alternative representations of the expression.
• Say you search for "FT(sin(x)/x)". It will return the Fourier Transform of the Sinc function, which is a square pulse.

Its your turn to experiment, give it a try.