Solve Math Problems on Android by taking a photo

Math, hate it or love it, there does not seem to be any middle ground. If your line of work requires math, or if you are in school or college, then you may find the math helper application AutoMath Photo Calculator quite useful.

If things go right, all you need to do to solve math problems is to take a photo of the equation. The app does all the heavy lifting and presents the correct answer to you.

AutoMath supports a variety of math questions or problems including algebra, fractions, polynomials and division.

If you got any of those in front of you simply take a photo of the equation using the app to get the result. This can be useful to make sure you got the right result or of course to avoid having to solve the problem on your own.

It is necessary to include only the equation that you want solved when you take the photo. This is done by adjusting the frame of the rectangle that is displayed when you take a photo so that it includes only the equation itself and nothing else.

There are limitations however and one of them is that handwritten questions are not supported. There are workarounds to this obviously for this, like printing out questions or displaying them on a monitor instead.

Other limitations include complex fractions, linear questions and calculus.

The app displays the equation that it recognizes giving you options to correct any identification errors that were made during the process.

It is not necessary to take a photo of the math problem that you want to solve. Another option that you have is to enter the equation directly in the app.

This can be done directly or by selecting one of the supported functions that the app displays when you tap on functions.

There is also an option to display a step by step answer which can help math students significantly.

Here is a video that demonstrates how the app works.

Closing Words

I was not able to get the same level of precision demonstrated in the video above.  It seems to depend a lot on the source that you are taking the photo from.

It was easy enough however to correct the characters that were not properly identified by the application's OCR system.

The app seems to have troubles with complex equations as well right now.

Adding equations manually in the app may be faster in certain circumstances, for instance if the app cannot recognize the source material correctly or if it is consists only of a couple of characters to type.

The idea behind AutoMath is great however and I wish I had access to an application like it when I was back in school. Not to finish homework faster but to make sure that I got everything correct.

Another plus is that it requires little rights and no Internet connection at all.