Do computers solve the equations yet?

[watchamadoodle]

YES, computers can do the hard stuff.... most of it, anyway.
There's a company called Wolfram with a nice piece of software called Mathematica that does just that - solve symbolic equations, among a bunch of other stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematica

You just need to tell it to do what you want it to do.

There's a guy that claims kids shouldn't need to learn boring old calculus, they should just learn how to use the tool that does the calculus for them:
http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_...anguage=en

And here's the big man himself:
http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wolfram...anguage=en

Thanks, I'm only halfway through the presentation, but it sounds interesting. It seems like math should be about learning relationships between the graphical appearance of the question and the graphical appearance of the answer. IMO