Big Bang Theory - The real Lenwoloppali Differential Equation Scanner

On a beautiful sunny Sunday, I was hanging out with my friends in the park, and we were chatting over the famous TV series - The Big Bang Theory(TBBT). And since both of my friends have strong math and computer science background, they started to talk about the Lenwoloppali Differential Equation Scanner. It was smartphone app in TBBT that you simple take a picture of a differential equation and you can get results right away, the app uses handwritten recognition and runs the equation through a data computation engine. We wish there were an app out there when we were in college dealing with Calculus.

But now, the Lenwoloppali differential equation scanner really exists with the help of machine learning. I personally know there is an app called Mathpal recently released on App store, you can take a picture with one click or you can hand crop the picture to fully capture the equation, then you hit equal sign to see answers. Below are what I found about the application：

1. It is quite cool by solving relatively easy and simple problems, and the recognition is great.

2. When the equation or expression gets a little complex, it starts to struggle, sometimes you need to take more than 2 times to get it right. And when it involves superscript, subscript, logarithm and other elements, the recognition starts to go crazy. You can try it yourself. 

3. It cannot solve system equations. 

4. It does not give you steps for roots, steps are only available for Calculus problems - integration and differentiation. Even you have the option to see steps, for some functions, it will show a red box says: cannot evaluate integral or derivative. 

5. The recognition speed will vary from 2 sec to 10+ secs depends on how long and complex the equation is.

6. If you know Latex, you can manually correct the expression to reach your desired outcome. 

Since it just came out, I cannot tell you right away if this is a useful app or not. I mean, to some extent, it is useful. But I will keep an eye on it to see how the experience improves over the time, and I hope it does. 

Please leave any comments you like. Thanks.