What you draw is what you get.
If you want to give it a try, visit:
If you like it, please join the announcements list. Joining the list is the best way to support me. It lets me know that people are interested in what I’m doing and it gives me a chance to hear your experiences, which will help me create more.
This is a low-frequency list. I will just let you know when the app is published in app stores and when new versions are coming out.
Created by: Tom Hyndman
Element Sketchpad is a purely Euclidean geometry sketchpad. There are no coordinates or numerals, so anything that you want to draw, you first calculate with a Euclidean construction.
Then illustrate the construction on a beat grid to create animations.
The canvas can be shared by groups, where anyone can affect the live environment, but you can only change the world via construction calculus or Element Scheme.
I built Element Sketchpad because I want to study Euclid’s Elements on a tablet. And I want to write programming languages like Scheme, APL and Haskell on a touchscreen interface. I just think it’s a pretty obvious thing to do.
Bill Casselman wrote an amazing book called Mathematical Illustrations, which put the idea for Element Sketchpad firmly in my head when I discovered it about ten years ago. Yes, the idea is obvious, and it’s a wonderful thing that in 2026, everyone is making beautiful math illustrations, but Casselman is OG. Reading his book is a constant source of inspiration.
I have a big problem with everyone else’s math illustration techniques. It is annoying to design a visual math illustration, and then have to solve the same problem a second time using coordinates and numerals. That is why I had to create this app. I needed to just draw a mathematical object and have it in the world. I needed a Euclidean calculator that also played nice with illustration, animation and music.