Walking Randomly

Over at Let’s Play Math, Denise has been writing about some of the search terms that end up sending people to her site and the results are rather interesting. For example, this month over 300 people found their way onto Let’s Play Math while searching for the term ‘Christmas’. Some people really like to plan ahead I guess. Other search terms that appear in her logs include things like “cute math expressions” and “ye olde math quiz”.

Denise challenged others to look through their own search logs to see what they come up with and it sounded like a fun way of passing a lunch hour so I took the bait.

It turns out that the most popular search term that gets people to walkingrandomly at the moment is ‘tangram’ since it is the top result on google images from google.co.uk. This surprised me as I think I have only mentioned tangrams once when I was talking about my Wolfram Demonstration for the broken heart tangram. The next most popular term is ‘mathematica’ which doesn’t surprise me at all as I do talk about it a lot although I am not (yet) the top search result for that particular piece of software.

So…what else brings people here according to my logs? The vast majority of the searches people used are pretty much the sort of thing I expected to see as I have written about them. Things like mathematics on pocket PC, Mathcad bugs, The Rosenbrock Function and Mathematica 6.0.3. Others were a bit more surprising though

• Walking in latex

I imagine that this particular searcher was bitterly disappointed!

• does anyone use programmable calculators anymore

Interesting question but I have no idea what the answer might be. I certainly don’t use them. Do you?

• mathworks sucks

I deal with the The Mathworks on a regular basis and, on the whole, I would disagree with this statement. Generally, I find them to be a pleasant, knowledgeable and helpful bunch but clearly this searcher thinks otherwise.

• mathematica 6.0.3 keygen

Tut tut. You’ll have no luck here, if you want to use it then you should pay for it. Use SAGE if you want (legal) free maths software rather than stealing other peoples work.

• mom in latex

I am starting to detect a trend here….

• secret math equations

Well if I told you what they were then they wouldn’t be a secret anymore.

• scary looking integrals

I plan on having a lot more of these soon.

• how free solved numericle problem in chemistry of 12th

Say what?

• gorgeous looking libraries

I do hope they found some.

• i have used full simplify to my equation in mathematica but i want to see the intermediate steps is that possible

No it’s not I’m afraid and if you could then it would not be very useful. Mathematica does maths VERY differently to the way you or I might.

• math make silver

I wonder what this person was looking for?

On the whole I am disappointed – nowhere near as many fun search terms as Denise but I did only go back a couple of months before I started going cross eyed from staring at thousands of terms. If you have a blog – what can you find in your search logs?

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to click here to subscribe to my RSS Feed.