Scientific Computing: Useful tool.

"Wolfram Alpha is an astonishingly powerful piece of software that helps you find nearly any piece of factual information you could want" (read more at: http://www.businessinsider.com/wolfram-alpha-2011-10). It can be used to answer many different types of problems ranging from what temperature the weather is in Timbuktu to your Calculus homework. However, it is still a work in progress as it is not smart enough to answer any questions you ask it because of the enormous difficulty involved in interpreting the text a user enters into it. However, there is no need to be upset when Wolfram Alpha says that it does not understand your question as Wolfram Alpha has an example page: http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/ for this purpose.

And so if we wanted to find the format we need to use for double integrals problems we can click on the 'Calculus' link beneath the 'Mathematics' text and image. From there we can click on the 'Integrals >>' button. Once there we can do a simple search in our web browser to find the format we need for a double integral problem which is:

int (x^2 y^2 + x y^3) dx dy, x=-2 to 2, y=-2 to 2

which gives us an answer of:

256/9

And then we can compare use Wolfram Alpha to solve one that we did by hand to make sure that we got the right answer in the case that we are working on is in a textbook that only has answers to the odd numbered problems.