Des-blog

Update February 1, 2024: The gallery is live! Thank you to everyone who participated. We were blown away by the artistry, care, and ingenuity on display this year. Choosing just 100 graphs was nearly impossible, but we expect you’ll be as inspired by them as we are. As you explore the gallery, be on the lookout for the small details and bits of magic you’ll find scattered throughout artist statements and notes. You can find the graphs at www.desmos.com/art.

Our Global Math Art Contest is one of the highlights of our year. It reinforces the connection between math and art and creativity. It pushes our technical limits. And it inspires wild new features and products (see the 3D Calculator) in our quest to make tools worthy of the incredible people who use us around the world.

This year’s contest begins now! You’re welcome to get started, even though submissions won’t open for another two weeks. You’ll be able to submit anytime between December 1st and January 15th.

As you’re thinking about what you’ll create, we wanted to share a few themes to consider this year.

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Today, we’re excited to share the fruits of over a year of labor at Desmos Studio: our new 3D Calculator.

Why jump into this new dimension? 3D graphing doesn’t make all that many appearances in K-12 education. Few people today instinctively reach for a 3D calculator when trying to reason about a question.

But that’s exactly why this tool has felt so important to develop. The world we inhabit is three-dimensional. So much interesting mathematics lives there, from the abstract (e.g. conic sections) to the practical (volume, surface area), to the professional (movie & game design). Yet very few of us have built up a deep intuition for how points, curves, and surfaces behave in three dimensions.

We’re hoping that we can help to change that. Over and over we’ve seen the power that comes from matching a powerful tool with a curious mind. The products we strive to build make it possible to more easily explore new ideas, to develop them, and to share them. We’re eager to hear from you whether we’ve hit the mark with this first version — and also how it can improve from here!

Read on for some interactive examples of the 3D Calculator in action.

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Desmos Studio PBC has a fresh new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to match our fresh new homepage.

You might have a pit in your stomach anytime you see an update like this. You might worry, as we often do, that it’s actually a sneaky power or privacy grab (“surprise, we now have the right to listen to all of your conversations!”). Not so here – the primary motivation for these changes is to reflect last year’s split into Desmos Studio and Desmos Classroom. For example, we needed to change every instance of Desmos Inc (which no longer exists) to Desmos Studio PBC (our new name). We also needed to remove references to Desmos Classroom, which is now part of Amplify and governed by their Acceptable Use Policy and Privacy Policy.

While we were revising, we wanted to make a few other improvements based on questions and feedback we’ve gotten over the past year. For example, we added clarity about allowed use of images generated using Desmos Studio’s tools. No additional permission is required for these uses – just attribution – even when embedded in a commercial application. Similarly, we’ve gotten some questions about whether Desmos-generated images are compatible with the CC-BY requirements for inclusion on platforms like Wikipedia. The answer: an enthusiastic yes, and our terms now reflect that as well. If you ever have a question about collaborating with Desmos Studio, you can find us at partnerships@desmos.com.

As always, we try for maximum transparency with changes to our policies. You can see a line-by-line “diff” of all of the changes, and can see the history of past changes as well. If you’re familiar with GitHub, you can subscribe to any future changes.

In general, we recommend reading through any company’s terms of service instead of relying on a summary from them. If there’s anything in there that feels off with our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, or any related docs, now or in the future, please let us know at feedback@desmos.com. We want these to be as straightforward and fair as possible, and will continue to refresh them as we hear from you, and as Desmos Studio PBC continues to grow and change in the years to come.

See the updated policies here:

• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy
• Privacy FAQs
• Student Data Privacy Statement
• California Privacy Rights Statement
• Cookie Policy