PhotoMath: advanced technology to solve equations

How often have painfully found x ultimately did not agree with the answer in the textbook… But this problem will help to solve the app PhotoMath.

Recently, we quoted Professor Keith Devlin spoke about the fact that school mathematics is obsolete, because the phones that we carry in the pocket, solve the equations faster than any human. Company MicroBlink via a smartphone app PhotoMath took another step towards the convergence of phones and school equations. PhotoMath solves for you examples – you only need to take a picture of the page with the job.

The application can be installed for free on phones with Windows Phone or iOS, the Android version will be ready by early 2015. The software recognizes printed text with a sheet of tutorial and a little worse from the computer screen. With examples, written by hand, PhotoMath is unable to cope.

The correct decision is issued in just a few seconds, and then you can see how it solved the equation step by step. The app supports arithmetic, fractions, roots, and degree, and simple linear equations. According to the developers, PhotoMath makes math easier because it not just solves problems, but also teaches the user how to solve them yourself.

Company MicroBlink few years have developed their own OCR system, and now began to think of her various applications. First there was the app PhotoPay, which allows you to pay bills using their scanning. Information from phone is transferred to the Bank who pays the bill automatically. Now they face recognition system has reached schools.

It seems that PhotoMath will make a revolution in school mathematics. Free application running on all major platforms, will quickly come to our schools. People who have already tried it out, noted that the program has its limits – long equations do not always fit into the red frame, or Vice versa – other examples of “creep” in the frame and interfere with the scan. But this, of course, does not happen very often.

Of course, someone this app will help to understand previously incomprehensible algorithms, but it is suspected that most will simply rewrite the correct answers into the notebook, arguing that the math they still will never be useful. How to cope with this our, solution-oriented examples of school mathematics? Doesn’t this prove that the emergence of PhotoMath that in this system, something needs to change? If new technologies and will coexist with the old curriculum, in what capacity?