I’ve blogged about using Wolfram|Alpha (W|A) widgets for general use. Since I teach an online intro stats course every year, I thought it be handy to embed the widgets right in the topics section within the course management system. W|A widgets can fetch some data distributions – it’s a lot easier to insert these types things at point of use… Read more →
You can now customize your Wolfram Alpha (W|A) queries using a W|A widget right on your web site. It’s currently in the Beta stage. You’ll see a widget,which I cooked up in a few minutes, below this post. I was able to control the output to just what I wanted. I did not need all sorts of complex number representations… Read more →
Just finished teaching a short course on software for use in math classes.It’s a course required for math majors, and the objective is to familiarize students with the various types of software to do math. Way back when, like ten years ago, math software was the domain of licensed software housed in college computer labs. The usual stuff happened –… Read more →
In my Introduction to Proofs course, I discussed the proof the following: The cube of an integer is of the form 9k, 9k+1, or 9k+8, for some integer k. The problem is from the text I use, How to Think Like a Mathematician: A Companion to Undergraduate Mathematics The big idea here is to to note that any integer can… Read more →
Wolfram Alpha is a free, online, computational engine. It provides some of the power of a computational algebra system (CAS) such as Maple or Mathematica without having to learn the proper syntax. However, it takes a little bit of practice to get WA to give exactly what you want. Here, I’ll give a list of queries that are commonly used… Read more →
There has already been a lot of buzz about the online computational engine called Wolfram Alpha (WA). You can check out this article in the Wall Street Journal, for instance. My main interest in WA is to figure out how to integrate it into the classes that I teach, which range from developmental mathematics to graduate level numerical analysis. In… Read more →