Campus

There’s an app for that

PhD candidate Aldo Brinkman describes the Wolfram Alpha app as “the Google for nerds.” Lest you think he’s being insulting, he admits it’s one of the most used apps on his phone.

“Google,” he explains, “doesn’t answer questions you enter into the search engine. It merely shows you sites that might have the answer.” Wolfram Alpha, on the other hand, actually tries to answer your question. It’s not a search engine; it’s a computational knowledge engine. When you ask it a question, it pulls potential answers from a knowledge base curated from sources ranging from the CIA’s World Factbook to Dow Jones.


The app, available for iOS and Android, famously used to cost $50 but the standard version is now available for €2.29. The web version is available for free, so you can try it out first and see if it can answer your question. 

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