We are starting year 2006 with a number of changes and new developments.
First, and the most noticeable change, is the new design of mathPAD Online. The old design based on frames was getting obsolete and sometimes very annoying. Therefore we have moved to a fluid and printable design using cascading styles. This task was not very straightforward and it took me a few days to design the pages template that will look the same or at least similar in a few popular web browsers. Although cascading styles 2.0 are not a new thing each browser supports them in a different way and differences between browsers are quite annoying.
The next step was to create cascading styles for print in such a way that on the printed page font size will change depending on user/browser preferences and the printed page will not contain all unnecessary elements like menus, logos, etc. This was more difficult than creating styles for display. However, I obtained something that for majority of web pages produces satisfactory printout. Unfortunately, in a few cases it may still happen that some page elements, like images, Flash elements or Java applets are not printed correctly. These are bugs in implementing cascading styles in some browsers.
Another important change in this year is the use of JavaView for displaying 3D graphics on mathPAD pages. MuPAD 3.x as well as the next version 4.0 support export of graphics to JavaView. Therefore, whenever it makes a sense, MuPAD graphics on mathPAD pages will be displayed as JavaView interactive virtual model. This will change mathPAD pages into mathematical exploratorium where we can read about mathematics as well as experiments with it.
We are starting this issue with a beautiful paper by Prof. Fred Szabo – Pour l'amour des math... I guess, this French title does not need to be translated and everybody knows what is the paper about. Prof. Szabo is a Canadian mathematician. He wrote a number of linear algebra textbooks. He writes frequently about teaching mathematics with CAS. In his Pour l'amour des math... Fred Szabo gives an overview of a number of things that keep for centuries people interest on mathematics.
Another interesting paper that comes in this issue is a paper on teaching multiple integrals with MuPAD by young scientist Danusia Rozploch-Nowakowska from Nicholas Copernicus University from Poland. The paper shows us how one can visualize the multiple integrals and calculate them using coordinates transformations.
In this issue of mathPAD Online we included also a large paper on Waterman polyhedra. Steve Waterman, Canadian mathematician, created the concept of Waterman polyhedra sometimes around 1990. This is a large group of polyhedra ranging from very simple shapes to huge objects with thousand of faces. The presented here paper presents the concept of Waterman polyhedra as well as the Waterman library in MuPAD. Finally, an interactive gallery will introduce us into the wonderful world of Waterman polyhedra.
Of course, this issue will contain a lot other interesting things. Some of them are already here and some other will be added later. So, let us start reading and experimenting.
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