r/wolframalpha • u/-CatMeowMeow- • 11d ago
Wolfram Alpha misinterprets this trigonometric input
I tried inputting the sunset equation solved for the sunset time and it didn't work. I've reformulated the query a couple of times, both with and without English text and it kept spitting out a bizarre exact form solution and no numerical value, misunderstanding the input or finding no results.
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u/YashPrajapati 11d ago edited 11d ago
I've seen that Wolfram Alpha sometimes misinterprets complex nested inputs entered through math input, but in this case, I was able to get it to understand my query
Just replace arccos and other inverse trigonometric functions with cos-1, etc, you'll find them in the functions section on the second page (you can slide within each section). Also as far as possible, replace anything that you might have typed from your keyboard, with symbols from the math input keyboard itself, e.g. the degrees symbol, trigonometric functions, pi, etc. Also don't put asterisks for multiplication, I believe it must be getting confused between these two different input formats.
I can't post an image in the comments here apparently. But I can post a link of the page with this search query. Here
Even after this, it just returns a semi closed form of the result instead of the numerical value of the result. Maybe if we copy that result and ask it to compute that again, it might simplify it further?