This Interactive Web Book is a demonstration of a possible shape for mathematics books of the future. It presents its story in the familiar way that a static text might present it, but with the exception that the pages of the story "come to life" and offer the reader the opportunity to make and test hypotheses, to experiment and explore in a visual and interactive way many of its main constructions and concepts. For many readers, this active participation in the story can add a dynamic dimension that will help them visualize certain of its ideas for the first time. Of course, the reader may print any web page in order to read it in the traditional way as static text offline between experiments, but these interactions are not ancillary; they are from the beginning an essential part of the narrative.

All of the documentation is available in the book itself as page-by-page HTML Help. Most pages are dynamic interaction pages, where you experiment with the ideas of the story as it unfolds. They offer simulations and command lines that range through topics like graphing and factoring polynomials to solving cubic equations to making constructions in abstract algebra. As you come to each page, open the Help, Help for This Page menu to read (or print) the story, then roll up your sleeves and ... play!

The mathematical documentation for this story was created fairly easily using Design Science MathPage™ technology with Microsoft Word 2000™ and Microsoft Help Compiler. And the mathematical interactions were created with Mathwright32 Author™. The Cardano Book may be read in Microsoft Windows™ (95, 98, Me, 2000, or XP) using Internet Explorer Browser 5.0 or later. In order to read it, you should sure you have MathwrightWeb Version 2.10 (after May 12, 2003, or later).

Cardano is not actually intended to teach the mathematical topics it develops to any particular student target audience. It covers a range of topics from high school to graduate-level mathematics. It moves at warp speed across several centuries of mathematics, beginning perhaps in the 16th Century, and ending with some results obtained by the authors, and published in the November 2001 issue of The American Mathematical Monthly. But it was written so that almost anyone who has studied a little algebra can "jump in" and play with it. Some topics that it covers are accessible to high school students, others to university students of Modern Algebra and Theory of Equations, and others may be of interest to graduate students, teachers, and professional mathematicians. So the aim is not to teach the mathematics but to demonstrate the range and the efficacy of a new style of web pedagogy and of authorship.