WolframAlpha Classic

Life just keeps on getting better …. in a week or so, I will have my first iPhone, and it will be a real treasure having it and the Assistant app or Siri connected to Wolfram Alpha and Nuance … the future is bright for those that are entering college, and are able to have such nice tools to keep the pitch of excitement at a very high level. ********************************************************** When I first attended college, all I had was a slide rule for math and a book of five-place logarithm tables to compute with, but now it it truly amazing to see the the changes in a lifetime. Because of all the cool science and math stuff now on my iPad, there is a strong gravitational pull to return to the university to excel in calculus even at my age. ********************************* I have been a user of this software for years and years and it was my main program to solve tricky math problems. I retired and stayed away from using it for several years. Very recently, I bought an iPad and one of the first programs to d/l was Wolfram Alpha. To test it, I simply asked, What is the Great Circle Distance between Iah and hkg? It always worked in the past; however, trying to see an answer left me very frustrated. They must have stripped good parts out of the free version and added them to the paid version. My suggestion, and what I am going to do is to use as my primary word-math solver is to use the incomparable free version of ChatGPT, found in the Apple App Store, which provided me with the correct answer plus showing step-by-step solution. Dated May 18, 2024.

This is an update to a previous 3-star rating. I was having an issue with this application after downloading iOS 14.4 for my iPad Pro. When I would enter a query it would show the computing message and the moving line but would not retrieve the data. It would eventually stop. This acted very much like my older iPad when its iOS could no longer be updated and this app would not run on it. After my 3 star evaluation, I received a note from a developer. In the meantime, I uninstalled the app and reinstalled it and it began functioning again. I have used this app in the kitchen nearly everyday for several years as I am working on creating gluten-free versions of family vintage recipes. I have found the data I need for converting from volume to weight measurements using this app. It is also great for calculating the nutritional values of the recipes.

This WolframAlpha app is useful for the ‘brief’ step-by-step solutions and advanced keyboard. This seems sufficient for the parent / school student use. (The subscription version would have more detailed intermediate steps) However, the additional $1 in-app purchase to analyze / recognize images is not directly useful for school math as it simply cannot recognize any math expressions. Almost any math app these days let you take pictures of math (Socratic, MS Math, Symbolab, Photomath, etc)- so this is a serious omission for a company with one of the best math engines. So the pro version is not as useful without this photo feature. In fact, you tend to use the other apps first to get the photo based math solving quickly and only use this app with a copy-paste of the problem using LaTeX if you need ‘steps’.