About Maths Solver

Maths Solver is a small, independent site that publishes long-form explanations of the maths topics students get stuck on at secondary school and in the first year of university, paired with simple step-by-step calculators that show how the answer was arrived at. Two people run it: Daniel Whitman and Sara Lin. There is no app, no premium tier, no login. The site is free to use, and is supported by a small amount of display advertising.

Why we started it

Both of us spent years writing the same explanations on whiteboards for one student at a time. When you teach the same topic enough times, you start to notice that the wrong answers come from a small, finite set of mistakes — forgetting the chain rule, dropping a sign on the discriminant, mis-identifying the hypotenuse — and that almost nothing on the internet is written specifically to address that small, finite set. Most existing “step-by-step solver” sites compete on covering the most topics with the shortest text. We are trying to do the opposite: cover fewer topics, in much more depth, and write each piece as if we were sitting next to one specific student who got it wrong on a homework problem.

How the site is put together

Each topic is one long article (typically 2,000 to 3,000 words) written by one of us, with our name, our background, and the date of the most recent update at the top. Where we use a calculator widget, it is embedded in the middle of the article as a way to check your work — not as the main attraction. The calculators run entirely in your browser, using math.js for symbolic work and the standard Math library for numerics. We do not store your problems on a server because there is no server.

At the time of writing (April 2026) only three pieces are finished in the new long-form format: quadratic equations, derivatives, and the Pythagorean theorem. The rest of the site is the older, shorter format that we are gradually rewriting; if you land on a thin page, that is why, and we apologise.

Who writes here

Editorial standards

Every article is written by one named author and read carefully by the other before it goes up. We aim for — and so far have managed — technical accuracy on every published page; if you do find an error, please tell us and we will fix it and credit you in the article’s edit log. Articles carry a “last updated” date and we revise older pieces when we notice something we wrote unclearly or when an exam syllabus changes the way a topic is presented.

We do not use generative AI to write articles. We sometimes use it for mechanical tasks like spell-checking and rephrasing single sentences, but the substance, the worked examples, the choice of mistakes to highlight, and the diagrams are all our own.

How the site is funded

A small number of unobtrusive display ads appear on article pages, served through Google AdSense. We choose ad placements that do not interrupt reading flow. We do not run sponsored content, do not insert affiliate links into article body text, and do not sell user data, because we do not collect any.

Get in touch

For corrections, suggestions, or just to say hello, the contact form reaches both of us, or you can write to [email protected]. We try to reply within a few working days.