Module 5

The concept of search has been redesigned with the answer to everyday questions being explained by a website named wolfram alpha. The sites long-term goal is to "make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone." The driving force behind the site is Stephen Wolfram who is a "distinguished scientist, inventor, author, and business leader." Wolfram has also produced Mathematica over the past 20 years.

"It is often said that the release of Mathematica marked the beginning of modern technical computing. Ever since the 1960s individual packages had existed for specific numerical, algebraic, graphical, and other tasks. But the visionary concept of Mathematica was to create once and for all a single system that could handle all the various aspects of technical computing--and beyond--in a coherent and unified way. The key intellectual advance that made this possible was the invention of a new kind of symbolic computer language that could, for the first time, manipulate the very wide range of objects needed to achieve the generality required for technical computing, using only a fairly small number of basic primitives."

I'm not into math at all but the exciting thing about wolfram alpha is the concept of collecting expert knowledge and broadcasting the subsequent information to the broadest possible audience, knowledge is power and this site equates more power to the people.




http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/history.html
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/
http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html