Tag: MATH

This morning I bought my first-ever paid Android application – Wolfram Alpha. I'm a big Wolfram Alpha fan, so in the past I've tried some of the free Wolfram Alpha apps I could find on the market. They were all basically front-ends to the existing Web interface, and were quite disappointing. If you're wondering why the screenshot above shows the keyboard and nothing else, it's because ...

If you've ever played around with Wolfram Alpha you know it is kinda like magic. Put in some words or ask a math question and bingo, there's an intelligent (and crazy accurate) answer. I spoke to managing director Barak Berkowitz about their Alpha "beta" and their future plans to put Wolfram Alpha on your web pages. ...

The best collection of Linux educational software for all ages that I know of is the openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e (Linux for Education) Live DVD. You can get it at http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Live#Download. There are some screen shots here. This is a Live DVD - you simply place the DVD in the computer's DVD drive and reboot the machine from it. When the machine comes up, you will be running ...

If you've been a Download Squad reader for a while, you've probably heard about the 3-D molecular puzzle game, Minim. I reviewed it back in May, and Jason reviewed it again in July (oops!). However, I've got my hands on the iPhone version now, and it's worlds better than the Flash one we played before. The object of Minim is to match up various numbered molecules until you clear the board. ...

Everybody loves a good Time Waster. Everybody loves ninjas. And everyone loves solving mathematical equations, right? Number Ninjas is all this goodness rolled up into one slick little Flash game! You play the number one, armed with a ninja's favorite projectiles: throwing stars. And by "stars" I mean +, -, /, and *. To complete a level, you've got to defeat enemy numerals using the correct ...

Calq is a free, lightweight, shortcut-key accessible calculator for both Mac OS X 10.4+ and Windows 2000/XP. The idea is to give you quick access to math functions without launching another program just to do simple calculations. Calq can run in your Mac menubar or Windows tray, but you can just have the program run in the background with no icons. You can select a hotkey to launch the calculator, ...

Instacalc just blows my mind. It's such a simple idea, brilliantly executed: It's sort of like a Web 2.0 mini-Excel, allowing you to quickly create a calculator for anything--body mass, loan repayment, YouTube valuation--with simple or complex calculations, and then share them with your friends, colleagues, or the world. It knows lots of mathematical operations and functions, understands things ...

Fractal flames are a particularly colorful and elegant breed of fractal. We've seen them previously in the beautiful Electric Sheep screensaver, but if you're feeling artsy and mathsy today you can make your own using Apophysis. It's an open source program for Windows that does fractal flames and fractal flames only. Getting started with Apophysis isn't too tough, but MS Paint it ain't. To really ...

BusinessWeek is running a story featuring Kevin Rose on the cover, with the headline: "How This Kid made $60 Million In 18 Months." That sounds like a heckuva success story, but not everyone believes the math. Our own CEO Jason Calacanis debunked it himself, but since he owns us and Netscape - a digg competitor - I figured y'all might want to hear it from others in the community too, including ...

Web Math is a site I found when frustrated one evening that I couldn't figure out how to calculate a certain scenario. In hindsight, the scenario was ridiculously simple, so I'd rather not describe it here. In any event, in my Google searches to find a suitable solver for my problem, I found Web Math, which has various solvers for different types of equations. What is so cool about Web Math is ...

Can computers do a better job than humans at telling authentic works of art from forgeries? Mathematician Dan Rockmore thinks it's possible. At ZDNet's Emerging Technology Trends blog has an interesting article about Rockmore's work at Dartmouth, where he's developed software that makes statistical comparisons of works of art to determine which were painted by the greats and which were ...