The WolframAlpha website (www.wolframalpha.com) describes itself as:
"Wolfram|Alpha introduces a fundamentally new way to get knowledge and answers — not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods."
WolframAlpha deals with numbers and computations, but cannot answer every numerically oriented question. Users input questions to the site and receive answers. I love numbers!
The home page is very simple:
1) I entered "how many 10th great-grandparents do I have" and received the answer (two screens):
The answer to the question was not explicitly stated. It's in the "blood relationship fraction" and is 4,096.
2) I entered "how many days since 15 October 1911" and saw:
The answer was 37, 270 days. The system also told me the day of the week for 15 October 1911 (my father's birthday), how many years/days, weeks/days, and decimal years.
3) I entered "usa population in 1900" and received the answer:
75.2 million people were in the United States in 1900. Presumably, that is from census records.
4) I entered "third cousin's great-grandson" and saw:
It showed me a chart showing the relationship and told me that my third cousin's great-grandson is my third cousin three times removed.
5) There are some questions I tried that WolframAlpha could not answer:
* "how many people died in 1918" resulted in famous people who died in 1918
* "how many people were born in 1943" exceeded the standard computational time.
* "how many persons do genealogy research" gave me world population
If these types of questions interest you, give WolframAlpha a try. It's free to use the standard version, and might help you understand relationships better and figure out some of your numerical questions.
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Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver
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