Alpha Raises Level of Research

by Ken Orr

In my last Trends Advisor (see "Wolfram|Alpha and the Future of Mathematics," 11 June 2009), I suggested that Wolfram|Alpha, which I'll refer to simply as "Alpha," was a potentially game-changing event in mathematical and scientific education. As luck would have it, I was at a Semantic Technology conference last week, and one of the sessions involved an open interview with one of Alpha's lead developers. Nothing that I found out there changed my fundamental view of the importance of Alpha and other similar tools, but it did cause me to go back and investigate Alpha in more depth. One of the things that caught my attention was an interview with Stephen Wolfram himself regarding the thought process behind this new tool.