Electronic Proceedings of the 12^th 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.