Quick - what's the area of a dodecahedron? I know, if you had a pad and pencil and a little time, you could derive it. I'll bet the time required is a square function of the time you have been out of school though.
Don't worry, the answer is at your fingertips. Type a search for area of a dodecahedron into the Google search bar and up comes the equation -- along with a field for the length of a side. Entering the length instantly gives the area.
This was less time than it took to locate the math handbook and flip through all the geometric shapes only to discover dodecahedrons are not covered.
In fact, you can use Google for a ridiculous variety of calculations. Google being Google doesn't brag about doing something so mundane as math, but it seems that their engineers have taken on solving equations for years. Maybe that's what they do on their 20% time.
I've just converted US dollars to Chinese currency as I bought a coffee and a pastry at the Beijing airport. 42 RMB semed high. And it was. That was by typing in "convert 42 RMB to..." and have Google guess I wanted dollars. How do they do that?
Curious, I thought I'd test Google some more. I put in a equation, vaguely remembering Google did graphs. Not only did it plot a decaying sine wave, you could pinch and enlarge the graphing area to change the domain.
I thought I had Google stumped when I entered absolute value of X as |X| but after I put it in in Excel friendly format "abs(X)" Google came up with it.