Des-blog

At Desmos, we’ve always looked to Google Docs (now Google Drive) for inspiration. With Docs (Drive), the Google Team figured out how to take a few ubiquitous and essential utilities and flip them on their head. Word processing and spreadsheets belong in the browser, where they can be accessed from anywhere, shared with a link, even edited collaboratively. As browsers become ever more powerful, it just makes sense that these programs not be locked in to specific devices or installed software.

We’ve long felt that the Graphing Calculator was ripe for similar disruption. The calculator of today looks exactly like it did in 1991, before Google or even Netscape. In our opinion, that’s a both a travesty for math education and a significant opportunity. We thus set out to re-imagine the calculator from the ground up, a calculator that exposes the beauty of math, that would make math fun instead of a chore, social instead of solitary. We imagined this calculator living entirely in the browser, built on top of the best the web has to offer. We spent months and months of late nights and early mornings and launched the html5 calculator in January of this year.

Well, it turns out that people wanted a better, more beautiful, more social calculator. Since launching a few months ago, we’ve seen a growing stream of truly inspiring graphs, from complicated math demos to beautiful drawings. Like this graph of a dog, made by Amy, a high school senior:

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/m0pd3us3am


…or this graph of a space shuttle launch, built by another high school senior, using over 273 separate equations:

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/if8aqbrqtc


Exciting to say the least. So when the Drive team reached out to us about integrating, it was a no-brainer. Drive represents what we believe to be the future of “files,” available in-browser on any device, and synched seamlessly between machines. For all of us at Team Desmos, our launch with Google Drive is a watershed moment, and the culmination of months of effort toward a shared vision – software that is inherently social and not tied to any device. This is an exciting time to be building web software, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to be part of it.


https://www.desmos.com/calculator/wcgejbfyqj

A couple days ago, we got a bug report that left us shaking our heads in collective confusion. The trouble? This graph:

Notice that f(π) is returning “undefined.” Trace doesn’t fare any better. But tan(π) = 0, so √tan(π) should also equal 0. What gives?

Well, it turns out that the problem lies deep in the heart of the javascript. Look at what the chrome console is giving us:

Aha! We should be getting zero when we take tan(π), but we’re actually getting a very small negative number. And you can’t take the square root of a negative number. This actually makes perfect sense: javascript only uses an approximation for π, and an approximation for tangent. Combine them, and you can’t expect exact results! But it’s giving the wrong answer here, and we hate giving the wrong answer.

How would you solve this, javascript coders? (send us your solution at jobs@desmos.com….). As of tonight, we have a solution that we think is pretty clever. Here it is in action:

… and we can all enjoy our bug-free pi.

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.