This is the six-month anniversary of the New Mathwright Library, and in this short time, we have had the privilege and the pleasure of serving an ever-widening, ever-growing audience. But a library is not a static thing. It is a garden of books and ideas that needs to be nurtured – and occasionally weeded. Our garden will grow only if you will tell us how you would like it to grow. The place to do that is on the “Write to us” page:
We know that many of you are students, though the majority are teachers. And we know that most teachers who visit teach undergraduate mathematics. While our principal goal is to support visualization through interactivity, we feel that the most important challenges for meeting this goal have barely been broached here. It is far more difficult (and more challenging) to create a meaningful interaction for a middle-school student than it is to create one for a college student. We have focused mainly on college-level materials, but would like to offer more at other levels. For that, we need your input.
Many of the topics that are considered “elementary,” such as ratio and proportion, measurement and counting, the relations between geometry and algebra, and so on, are in fact far from elementary. These are a few of the concepts that all future mathematical knowledge will be built upon. But we are also interested in treating the ideas by illustrating them and giving the reader a chance to “play” with them. It is, as many of you know, an extremely difficult thing (if it is possible at all) to distill in a computer activity the essence of a basic idea. We are not talking here about “drill and practice” exercises. You will find many excellent examples of those in ordinary texts, or on other web sites. We are interested here in explorations that allow students to ask their own questions. The questions are much more important than the answers.
You can help us tailor this Library more to your needs and interests, or to the needs and interests of your students (whether they be elementary school students, home-schooled students, high school or college students) by offering your suggestions and your advice. If you have an idea for an interaction that you would like to see in the Library, please pass it along to us. Or simply tell us who you are, and how you use the Library. The best way to do that is on our “Write to us” page: Another way, which has not been used so far is to submit an article in the Discussion Forum. Anyone can do it, and you might find that others will respond to what you have to say.
On the other side of that coin, it is time for us to give you some feedback on who’s reading what at the Library. Actually, we cannot tell you who, but we can report on some of the most popular WorkBooks in the months of April and May.
In April, there were 135 new registrations in the Library. In May, there were 221 new registrations. And in April, 1648 WorkBooks were downloaded, while in May, the number of downloaded WorkBooks climbed to 1827. 161 Mathwright Library Player programs were downloaded in April, and in May, there were 359 Player Program downloads. That is very gratifying growth in this two-month period. We hope and expect that it will continue as you tell your friends about us. The “Top 30” WorkBooks were:
| WorkBook | April downloads | May downloads |
| Introduction to Mathwright | 168 | 387 |
| Command Line | 51 | 93 |
| Exploring Functions | 66 | 60 |
| Golden Ratio | 19 | 66 |
| Discrete Math Set | 34 | 50 |
| Linear Functions | 23 | 50 |
| Quadratic Functions | 27 | 49 |
| Derivatives 1 | 29 | 46 |
| Geometry | 42 | 31 |
| Work Problems | 34 | 35 |
| Word Problems | 20 | 45 |
| Curves in the Plane | 31 | 19 |
| Synthetic Division | 14 | 34 |
| Eigenvectors | 20 | 28 |
| Bernoulli Trials | 17 | 31 |
| Area Under Curves | 15 | 33 |
| Differential Equation Set | 25 | 22 |
| Conics | 17 | 29 |
| Follow | 24 | 23 |
| Derivatives 3 | 13 | 31 |
| Calculus 1 Set | 22 | 22 |
| 2D Vectors | 17 | 26 |
| Newton’s Method | 20 | 17 |
| Expert System | 24 | 13 |
| Heron’s Formula | 20 | 16 |
| Difference Equations | 19 | 17 |
| Periodic Functions | 18 | 18 |
| Mapping Geometry | 21 | 15 |
| Set Safari | 11 | 22 |
| Row Reduction | 14 | 18 |
In addition, 2 new WorkBooks were added to the Library in May.
Cubic Equations had 34 downloads in May
Odds and Integrals has had 30 downloads by June 3.
We were very pleased to learn last month that a large number of new registrants to the New Library are homeschoolers. In many ways, the New Mathwright Library shares many of the goals of homeschoolers. We encourage individual, self-paced learning, and we try to provide food for thought for the most varied palate. You will not find much of the routine “drill and practice” at our site, but if you seek challenging and nourishing fare that goes beyond the traditional curricula, then you have come to the right place.
No doubt, many of the WorkBooks listed in Article 1 as being among the “Top 30” were also popular among homeschoolers. We will not list recommendations here, because the needs of homeschoolers are so diverse.
In fact, it occured to us that there is a special opportunity and challenge here that it might be worth our while to explore. While there is much in common between our aims and yours, the Library was not designed to cater to the particular needs of homeschoolers. But it would be a worthwhile thing if we could learn more about the sorts of explorations that you might find valuable.
Therefore, we are adding a new topic to our Mathwright Library Forum called “Homeschooling” and we encourage you to visit and tell us how we can serve you better. You may start a thread in that topic on, say Geometry, and offer suggestions (as detailed as you like) on what you would like to see in the Library. And of course you may visit our “Write to us” page. As we indicated in Article 1, we are a flexible and changing library, but if you do not tell us what you want, we can only guess your needs. So, write to us. Tell us what works, what does not work, and what can be improved. We’re all ears.
James E. White, Editor
If you came here from the old building,
