Introduction

Every once in a while, something comes along that is functional, inspiring and beautiful. Such is the case of the Desmos Graphing Calculator.  Do yourself a favor and click that link to see the elegant simplicity of this very powerful tool. 

Prior to today, I had never heard of the Desmos company or their work. I caught a glimpse of the graphing calculator today and did a little research. Once I completed that, I had to write this article to share the information.

I believe I will be using this tool a lot in the future. I think it is going to replace a lot of the work I do in Wolfram-Alpha due to its simplicity, functionality, and elegance.

The Graphing Calculator

Math comes to life when you use the graphing calculator. You can do a lot with this tool. You can build equations to visualize them, you can solve problems, and you can explore your mathematical imagination very quickly. I think this is a wonderful tool that can be run on the desktop or as an application on mobile devices. One great feature of this product is that it is free.

Examples

Here are a few pictures of examples that are provided with the graphing calculator.

There is an activity community of users of this tool and a lot of their activity can be seen on Twitter.

Final Thoughts

This company has a vision that they are fulfilling in very useful ways. I think their work is really important and they will help many students learn to love math and to achieve better data comprehension.

I can see very easily that there are many ways in which this product could be expanded to make it even more versatile, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with it. Thank you Desmos and I wish you a lot of success! My only regret is that this tool wasn’t available about 45 years ago!