Note that this result returns both a element and an element. This way, only pods with that exact ID are returned in the XML output: For instance, if you only wanted the "Result" pod from the above output, you could use the includepodid parameter: &includepodid=Result You can add URL-encoded parameters to customize output. Here is the XML output for the "population of France" query, with most elements collapsed for brevity: Ħ4.1 million people (world rank: 21st) (2014 estimate) Even though the site would be just as sweet under any other logo.When executed with a valid AppID, this URL will return an XML document with informational elements (referred to as pods relating to the input. So, as the site continues to grow and move forward, it’s likely that its logo will continue to reflect this growing sophistication in some small measure. With so much in the universe left to compute, we know there are years of refinements, additions, and enhancements that will follow the initial release of Wolfram|Alpha. My colleagues and I have been working very hard for nearly three years to make sure that it includes many interesting and useful things, one small part of which (as you might expect) is the ability to compute and display properties and images of many polyhedra (not to mention a few other mathematical objects). Of course, the real fun of Wolfram|Alpha is not what’s in its name or its logo, but rather in what it can do. Rather surprisingly, this solid is actually inferred to exist in nature as the central core of a quasicrystal aggregate of Al 6Li 3Cu produced by slow solidification. To explore some of the solid’s properties, see Sándor Kabai’s “ Inside the Rhombic Hexecontahedron” example at the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. It turns out that this solid has a number of very interesting mathematical properties, including several relations to the famous golden ratio. (For more details on the rhombic triacontahedron and the process of stellation, the reader is referred to MathWorld). The rhombic hexecontahedron is a polyhedron that can be obtained as one of the 227 “fully supported” rhombic triacontahedron stellations. After rejecting many candidates, we finally settled on the attractive solid known as the rhombic hexecontahedron (“rhombic” refers to the fact that the faces of the solid consist of rhombi, while “ hexecontahedron” is a word derived from the Greek, which simply means “60-faced solid”).
We considered hundreds of possibilities, including many from my rather extensive collections of polyhedra on MathWorld and PolyhedronData. For a very interesting account of how the current-generation Spikey was created, see the fascinating Wolfram Blog post by Michael Trott.įor Wolfram|Alpha, we wanted a simple yet elegant polyhedral logo that harked back to Spikey (yet retained its own intrinsic uniqueness), was geometrically interesting, and was visually attractive. The current Spikey is an embellishment of a so-called hyperbolic dodecahedron (basically, a regular dodecahedron whose faces become special curved surfaces according to fixed mathematical rules). More elaborate forms of Spikey were used in each subsequent version of Mathematica. And this is where I, geometry enthusiast and the developer of the PolyhedronData computational data collection, came into the picture.Īs many of you may know, Mathematica‘s logo is a three-dimensional polyhedron affectionately called “ Spikey.” In its original (Version 1) form, Spikey consisted of the spiked solid obtained from an icosahedron (the regular 20-faced solid that is one of the five Platonic solids) with regular tetrahedra (triangular pyramids) affixed to its faces. Its logo is no exception.Īs a tip of the hat to the vast and powerful computational engine that powers Wolfram|Alpha, a natural place to start brainstorming for an appropriate logo was in Mathematica itself. Every aspect of Wolfram|Alpha has been thought through in great detail.
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