“Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer should be”
There’s been a lot of talk on Twitter this week about an app called PhotoMath. It scans mathematics live and then gives an “answer” to the question. This is a screenshot of it: Some comments on Twitter seem to think it’s cheating whilst others think it’s the future (although to be honest most seem to mirror my experience of struggling to get it to read anything sufficiently accurately to evaluate or solve it). Any question that can be answered by a computer should be Arthur C Clarke once said “Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer should be”. It’s a great quote and I’d like to offer a variation on this: Any question that can be answered by a computer should be. The whole point of mathematics is to investigate the relationships between mathematical objects or solve real problems (I’ll skirt round the definition of “real” here!). There are many processes that are useful in doing this but where they can be reduced to algorithms (such as solving linear equations, s