A basic calculator application

Operating systems generally come with a basic calculator application. It’s useful, but let’s face: it’s very limited. At left is the default Dashboard calculator, included with Mac OS X. If all you need to do is add, subtract, multiply and divide in relatively simple sequences, this sort of calculator will do just fine. This one even has memory functions, making it slightly more versatile.

If, however, you need to do more complicated calculations (for instance, something involving exponents) you would normally need to go find a more sophisticated calculator application. There are many of these available for download on the Internet, and they are great to have if you need them often.

Most of us don’t need to do complicated calculations all that often, though, and luckily there is another choice: Google.

Many people do not realize that Google can actually do math for you. In fact, Google’s built-in calculator is more powerful and versatile than many of the calculators you can download. It can do the same simple calculations that the calculator that came with your OS can handle:

A simple calculation using Google

It handles more complicated calculations with ease:

A more complicated calculation using Google

These calculations can be as complicated as you want them to be. Google can handle multiple levels of parentheses, all the mathematical operations you are accustomed to (although you may have to learn a few new conventions, such as using * for multiplication and ^ for exponents), and many, many common mathematical functions. Here’s an example using cosine:

A Google Math calculation using the cosine function

Unless you have a strong math background, you probably don’t see anything wrong with the calculation I just did. My math teacher alarm is going off, though, and for a good reason. Like many calculators, Google can do calculations in many different units. For trig functions, the default unit (when you don’t specify one) is radians. So if you were expecting that calculation to give you 10 times the cosine of a 30-degree angle, that expression won’t quite work. Instead, you need to specify the units you are using:

The same calculation, this time including the units we want

That looks more like it! My inner math teacher is satisfied that this is the answer we were really after.

As it turns out, Google is capable of interpreting a wide variety of units. For you and me, this means that in most cases we don’t have to worry about them! Let me demonstrate with a silly example. Say you wanted to know how long it would take you to drive your car to the sun. Your car can go 60 miles per hour, and we know that the sun is one astronomical unit away from the earth. Since we know the sun is very, very far away, we probably want the answer to be in years. So:

A calculation using multiple units

Isn’t that amazing? To me, this is the true power of Google Math. You tell it what you want, and it figures it out for you. You can use it to translate units (enter something like “cups in a gallon” or “124 inches in feet” and you’ll see what I mean), do complicated calculations with units (great for downsizing–or upsizing–recipes, for instance), or just have it do simple math for you.

The best way to learn what it can do is to play with it, so go have fun!

Tagged as: google