MathWorld Headline News

MathWorld Introduces New Interactive Features for Teachers and Students

By Eric W. Weisstein

July 6, 2005--Wolfram Research and the MathWorld team are pleased to announce the unveiling of a number of exciting new features on the MathWorld website. These innovative features represent a major update of the site--the first since its graphical redesign of February 2004 (MathWorld headline news, Feb. 11, 2004). These enhancements are the result of several years of effort by the MathWorld team and enhance the usability, interactivity, and navigability of the website. Some of the new functionality has been developed with partial support from a National Science Digital Library grant from the National Science Foundation to researchers at the University of Illinois math and engineering libraries and Wolfram Research. We hope you enjoy these new features, and also that you continue to use and rely on MathWorld as an important resource in your mathematical explorations.

• The new MathWorld Classroom,
• New interactive entries,
• A streamlined comment and contribution system,
• Special information for Mathematica users.

The MathWorld Classroom

The new MathWorld Classroom provides a set of pop-up "capsule summaries" for more than 300 entries in algebra, geometry, trigonometry, statistics, pre-calculus, calculus, number theory, and other math courses ranging in educational level from elementary school to graduate school. Each page complements an existing MathWorld entry, thus giving teachers and students a convenient way to explore mathematical topics as they might be encountered in a classroom.

A typical MathWorld Classroom entry contains:

1. A link to the main MathWorld article,
2. A short definition,
3. The academic level of the topic,
4. Educational standards in which the topic appears,
5. Examples,
6. Other Classroom articles in the same subject area, and
7. Other Classroom articles covered in the same type of course.

	The MathWorld Classroom can be navigated in several ways. First of all, Classroom entries are easily accessible from the top of each MathWorld article that has a corresponding Classroom page. To access a Classroom page from a main MathWorld article, simply click on a link such as the one illustrated at left.
	Similarly, each Classroom entry contains a link back to the full MathWorld article. To access the main MathWorld article from a Classroom popup, simply click on a link such as the one illustrated at left.

In general, Classroom pop-ups and MathWorld pages are "sticky," so all Classroom entries open in the same pop-up window and, when clicking back to a main MathWorld entry, target the main browser window from which they were originally accessed. While exploring a mathematical topic, it is therefore simple to switch back and forth between MathWorld and the Classroom. However, note that to use the Classroom in this way requires that JavaScript be enabled in your browser.

A second method of navigation is through the Classroom course pages of MathWorld, accessed through the new MathWorld Classroom link listed in the sidebar's DESTINATIONS section. The main Classroom page contains a list of commonly encountered mathematics courses. In addition, each course (or subset of a course) is a link, and clicking on any of the links brings up a list of concepts commonly encountered in the given course that are covered in the MathWorld Classroom.

While we feel that the new Classroom pages will prove very useful to students and educators, we are very interested in your comments and feedback. So please feel free to send a message to the MathWorld team if you have any helpful comments.

Interactive Entries

Another enhancement unveiled today on MathWorld is the inclusion of hundreds of interactive visualizations powered by webMathematica. These visualizations bring added depth to selected MathWorld articles, and many of the graphs and images which were once static are now dynamic web applications that allow the user to change parameters and explore topics interactively.

Currently, the majority of interactive examples are one- and two-dimensional plots. However, keep an eye out for further developments as many more entries are made interactive. For an example of things to come, note the image at the right, which shows a slightly more complicated example currently live on MathWorld that allows visualization and computation of Riemann sums.

Comment or Become a Contributor

MathWorld continues to grow in size and popularity under the guidance of its creator Eric W. Weisstein, and it remains the planet's most widely read resource for mathematics. As of July 2005, the site contains more than 12,315 entries. While reader feedback is an indispensable part of MathWorld's success, hundreds of contributors have also been instrumental in building the site into the preeminent mathematics resource that it is today.

As a reader of MathWorld, you may already know the site as the world's most visited mathematical resource. You may even have noted that MathWorld is updated with new and enhanced material on an almost daily basis. What you may not know is that your contributions are welcome. While the author of this news story has personally written the vast majority of material appearing on the site, MathWorld has also benefited from the input of more than 300 amateur and professional mathematician contributors from around the world. Since creating a website that attempts to cover all things mathematical is a truly monumental task, please consider contributing to this free and high-quality mathematical resource.

Special Information for Mathematica Users

If you use MathWorld and have Mathematica, you can take advantage of another new feature on MathWorld. Selected pages now feature special information and links that help you explore topics further in Mathematica. In addition, if you browse MathWorld from an institution with Mathematica licenses, you can now access information about the availability of Mathematica at that institution from a convenient customized link.