Web-based Interactive Extras

You are probably familiar with applications such as Microsoft Excel that allow you to manipulate numbers in all sorts of ways, and you may know about applications such as Maple, Mathematica, or MathCad that allow you to manipulate symbols in mathematical expressions. Symbolic math is much more difficult for a computer than numerical math (a computer's only true forté), but the result is worth the programmer's effort. LiveMath is a reborn application that started life as a program called Theorist several years ago. Theorist was bought by the people who make the math application called Maple, but they let it languish. (They changed its name to MathView for a while, but never pushed it strongly as a product.) The author of Theorist, in collaboration with another company, bought the software back from Maple, and they have released it under the LiveMath name. Its strength lies in symbolic manipulation with a graphical interface that looks like real math, just as you would write it on a page. The main application, called LiveMath Maker, produces files that can be displayed and manipulated to a limited extent in a web browser. To do so, you need the LiveMath plug-in, which you probably do NOT have! We will use it in connection with some of the supplemental lecture pages pages in this site. To get your free copy of this plug-in, click the logo below, and follow the instructions, selecting the computing platform you use at the top of their page.

Once you have downloaded and installed this plug-in on your computer (and remember: if you use other computers around campus from time to time, chances are pretty good they will not have this plug-in installed), you can test the plug-in and learn how it works on our LiveMath Tutorial and Test page.