Training the next generation of nitpickers

One of my students just submitted his first bug report to Wolfram. I’m so proud.

This is arguably not a bug, but it’s certainly unexpected, nonstandard, and undesirable behavior. Wolfram Alpha is calculating the norm of a vector as the square root of the sum of the squares of the vector’s components (i.e., the usual Pythagorean relation). But when the vector has complex numbers, that’s not the right thing to do: you have to use absolute squares. Otherwise, you get absurd results like these, and your norm isn’t even a norm.

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Ted Bunn

I am chair of the physics department at the University of Richmond. In addition to teaching a variety of undergraduate physics courses, I work on a variety of research projects in cosmology, the study of the origin, structure, and evolution of the Universe. University of Richmond undergraduates are involved in all aspects of this research. If you want to know more about my research, ask me! View all posts by Ted Bunn

2 thoughts on “Training the next generation of nitpickers”

So, in fact, you have to separate vectors with complex coordiantes from those with real. Maybe this is is not present at Wolfram Mathematica

Indeed, Mathematica, unlike Wolfram Alpha, does this correctly.

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