Electronic Proceedings of the 12th Asian Technology Conference in Mathematics

 

 

            Abstract for 13259

            Making Mathematics Fun, Accessible, and Challenging using

            Mathematica 6

            Authors: Paul Abbott

            Affiliations: School of Physics, University of Western Australia

            Keywords:

 

            The theme of this year’s conference is "Making Mathematics Fun,

            Accessible and Challenging through Technology". Version 6 of

            Mathematica, released in May 2007, is instantly interactive,

            allowing teachers and students to easily construct live interfaces

            to illustrate and investigate mathematical concepts at all levels.

            Over 1700 examples of these interactive capabilities, including a

            number written by high school students, are freely available at the

            Demonstrations Project website (http://demonstrations.wolfram.com).

            Other new features of Version 6, relevant to this conference,

            include high-quality adaptive visualization of functions and

            load-on-demand data of mathematical properties such as graphs,

            knots, lattices, and polyhedra. In this talk I will demonstrate

            several of these new capabilities, showing how much fun one can have

            when the technology is high-level, robust, portable, and easy to

            use.