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We are happy to announce the launch of the free Beta version of the Wolfram Education Portal. The portal comes equipped with a dynamic and interactive textbook, lesson plans aligned to the common core standards, and many other supplemental materials for your courses, including Wolfram Demonstrations, widgets, and videos. The Education Portal currently contains full materials for Algebra and partial materials for Calculus, but will continue to grow and improve with your comments and feedback.

education mathematics

In the 19th century, Lord Kelvin made the inspired guess that elements are knots in the "ether". Hydrogen would be one kind of knot, oxygen a different kind of knot---and so forth throughout the periodic table of elements. This idea led Peter Guthrie Tait to prepare meticulous and quite beautiful tables of knots, in an effort to elucidate when two knots are truly different. From the point of view of physics, Kelvin and Tait were on the wrong track: the atomic viewpoint soon made the theory of ether obsolete. But from the mathematical viewpoint, a gold mine had been discovered: The branch of mathematics now known as "knot theory" has been burgeoning ever since.

...Sam Nelson describes a novel approach to knot theory that has gained currency in the past several years and the mysterious new knot-like objects discovered in the process.

mathematics

The truth is that different sets of math skills are useful for different careers, and our math education should be changed to reflect this fact.

...most citizens would be better served by studying how mortgages are priced, how computers are programmed and how the statistical results of a medical trial are to be understood. ...

A math curriculum that focused on real-life problems would still expose students to the abstract tools of mathematics, especially the manipulation of unknown quantities. ...

Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering.

...what we need is “quantitative literacy,” the ability to make quantitative connections whenever life requires...and “mathematical modeling,” the ability to move practically between everyday problems and mathematical formulations (as when we decide whether it is better to buy or lease a new car).

education mathematics