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THE MATHWRIGHT LIBRARY NEWSLETTER, May 2003, VOL 5,
#3
A publication of Bluejay Lispware
James E. White, Editor
The official publication of the New Mathwright Library and Café:
In this issue:
16
Free
Microworlds at theVisualization Studio
of the MATH Cafe
16 Free Microworlds at the Visualization Studio of the MATH Cafe!
As
you may have read on the About Us page, the
books in this Library are designed to help students visualize
mathematical strategies and concepts, and to participate in
the construction of their knowledge in structured Microworlds that invite
them to ask their own questions, and, in the best cases, that provide meaningful
answers.
Since
we want you to know how flexible and expressive Mathwright is, we have created
the Visualization Studio at the MATH Cafe,
where you can sample some of our better Microworlds in your browser. These
Microworlds are free to view in your browser
whenever you like, and you do not have to belong to the Library to view them.
There is no red tape. Just try them out, and if you like them and join the
Library, you may download the off line versions to begin building your own
permanent visualization library on your own machines. And of course, you may
view and download any of the 218 Microworlds and WorkBooks at the Library
while you are a member.
Once
you download the latest version of MathwrightWeb
(Version 2.10, May 12, 2003) just visit the Cafe, pull up a chair, and start
reading. Many of the Microworlds in this free collection now use on line Windows
HTML Help to tell the story. You will find that with its sophisticated navigation,
colorful illustrations, and with the math formatting capabilities of HTML
Help, the stories in our Interactive Web Books: Cardano,
Heron's
Formula, Odds
and Integrals, and Exploring
Quadratic Functions
read like text books --
but these books are full of experiments! No more hopping from web page to
web page, the web pages are now in the books themselves.
Among
the Microworlds in the Visualization Studio are two new featured ones by Jim
Swift: Periodic Functions, and
Fractals and the Mandelbrot set.
Both tell their story with Windows Help.
You
will find an expanded (6 page) version of the Logo
Playground that will teach you Logo while you write and test sophisticated
Logo programs using (if you like) multiple turtles. For this object-oriented
book, we have created a command language that contains the principal Logo
commands, and more. We use Windows Help to tell this story too.
For
those of you interested in 3D Graphics, the Visualization Studio has just
the book for you. Check out the new Implicit Surface Constructor of 3
Dimensional Graphics. Walk through a Lorenz Attractor, or just orbit
a Space Shuttle. It's all good!
Is
Artificial Intelligence your cup of Java? Our new expanded (5 page) Symbolic
Calculator and Expert System will give you the free use in your browser
of a programmable symbolic and graphical calculator that will do just about
anything you want in decimal, exact rational, or unlimited precision integer
mode. It also contains a small Expert System as a template that you can use
to build your own system of rules for simplifying and transforming algebraic
expressions based on functional identities. A great place to learn about Expert
Systems while building one!
Speaking
of exact rational calculations, be sure to visit the Rational
Matrix WorkBench. Matrix operations (such as inversion, LUD operations,
determinants, etc.) are best done in exact rational mode when the entries
are rational. Otherwise, the answers will likely be wrong! The Rational Matrix
WorkBench is like a calculator for rational matrices. You made need (or want)
no other Matrix tool when you see what this baby will do.
The
idea is to show you the range and the power of our LISP environment running
in Java. There are 6 other Microworlds at the Visualization Studio that are
generally designed for High School Students and we encourage you to check
them out.
It
may appear that the interactions that one finds on the exploration pages of
Microworlds are simply Java applets. While they behave like applets, they
are different from them for several reasons. Perhaps the most important from
the viewpoint of authorship and web design is that they were not written in
Java, but were created in a high level object-oriented mathematics scripting
language called Mathscript. Further the visual design was graphical "point-and-click"
or "What you see is what you get." This combination, using our new
Mathwright32 Author™ program,
produces efficient Java code, but does not require any knowledge of Java itself.
It is much simpler to write books with than Java.
One
might also point to the range of resources available to these books, and to
every Microworld that uses the MathwrightWeb Control. They make use
of HTML Help, a symbolic Expert System, exact rational computer algebra, sprite
animation, 3 Dimensional OpenGL graphics, command-line tools, and special-purpose
user-defined languages built to do anything from implementing Logo to representing
and manipulating ring-theoretic objects. All of these capabilities are immediately
available in any Microworld once one has the MathwrightWeb Control. An applet
would, in principle, have to download these resources each time a new book
was read.
Another
difference is this. A Mathwright Microworld is a multi-page mathematically
savvy interactive story that invites you to ask questions, and (usually) gives
you answers. You read it with page-by-page HTML Help that provides sophisticated
navigation, attractive and colorful mathematical formulas, charts, illustrations
and text. It is a new medium. Welcome to the future!
The
technology that enables us to do this is freely available to you on line through
MathwrightWeb in your ActiveX enabled browser (MSIE 5.0 or later, for
example) and also off line through Mathwright32 Reader and Mathwright
2000. When Microsoft moves to the .NET framework in its next operating
system, you will be able to read all of our Microworlds on line with our new
MathwrightNET and off line with Mathwright32 Reader NET, but
for now, we recommend you use the first three programs, especially MathwrightWeb,
to view our books.
James E. White, Ph.D.
Library Director