student highlight: Amy, high school senior

Occasionally, we see a graph that just blows us away with its beauty and ingenuity. Like this one:

[click on the image to play around with the graph yourself]

We reached out, and got the following response from its author, Amy:

My precalculus class had to make a graphed picture using the at least one of each of the trigonometric functions. It was time consuming and difficult to do on the TI84 so my friend recommended the Desmos website that she found through google. It was great! It made the project fun and cut my work time in half! I am currently a senior in high school.

It’s hard to describe, as an entrepreneur, the significance of a response like this. We wake up early, stay in late, work weekends, all with a vision of the impact that we can have. We want to believe that we’re making it cheaper and easier to graph equations, obviously. But that’s just a small part of our motivation. We’re driven by our vision of making math fun, of breaking down the barrier between the perceived mechanical coldness of equations and the humbling beauty of the world. We can talk about that all day, we can write code that we think has that effect. But it’s only when we see our ideals embodied in the incredible creativity of a real student – that’s what makes the long hours worth it.

Do you have a story of how you’ve used our calculator? Email us at calculator@desmos.com. There is nothing that keeps us going like hearing from real users.

Thank you, Amy. And incredible work.