During Cornell Engineering’s prelim season, Duffield Hall is packed, Ed Discussion is overflowing, and office hour lines are out the door.
To make last-minute help more accessible, Yanni Kouloumbis ’26 and Nour Gajial ’26 founded MathGPT, an artificial intelligence-powered platform that offers step-by-step, easy-to-understand homework explanations. Since its launch in August 2023, MathGPT has reached over one million users worldwide according to Gajial.
“The two days before a prelim, office hours are going to be swamped,” Kouloumbis said. “If you don’t really understand something, there’s not a lot of ways to get help.”
To address this issue, Kouloumbis and Gajial built MathGPT. Users can upload a screenshot of their problem and receive step-by-step instructions on how to solve it. Its newest feature even creates an AI-generated video to explain the solution.
Both computer science majors in the College of Engineering, Kouloumbis and Gajial met in a first-year advising class when Kouloumbis mentioned needing more people to join a team for a National Aeronautics and Space Administration hackathon in New York City.
Since then, the pair have gone to over eight hackathons together, notably winning the largest collegiate hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania.
At first, they created a plain user interface version of MathGPT for their friend group. In an effort to reach more students who needed on-demand help, they turned to Discord.
“We would reach out to potential users on ‘homework help’ Discord servers, solving their problems with our own product, which helped us acquire our first 100 users,” Gajial said.
MathGPT gained popularity from Google searches looking for “Math AI Calculator,” according to Kouloumbis and Gajial. The number of students searching for MathGPT grew from 33 daily clicks in August 2023 to 310,000 monthly clicks in May 2024.
During finals week of the spring semester, Gajial decided to make a TikTok video, walking others through how to use the tool, ultimately reaching 1.6 million students.
“We’ve become a tool in every student’s studying kit,” Kouloumbis said. “We were one of the first companies to offer on-demand math help.”
Reflecting on their experiences, Kouloumbis and Gajial note how going to hackathons, constantly problem-solving and building real products, gave them the perseverance and skills to solve a common challenge for students.
Yangzom Noga Tenzin can be reached at [email protected].