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Math Animated is a modern course-ware for Calculus, with animated and interactive graphics, free of charge.
It is based on a course called "Introduction to math for physicists", given by me (Samuel Dagan) at the Tel-Aviv University, before my retirement as a professor of physics. The aim of the course was to supply to the fresh, first year students of physics, the necessary tools of calculus, so they can follow at the same time the introductory course to Physics. The students have already learn a lower level of calculus at high school.
At the same period of time, but at different years, I gave the introductory course of Physics, to the same type of audience, and I could not avoid to notice the difference in the behavior of the students in both. Teaching physics was accompanied occasionally with live demonstrations, which brought life to the class. The equations became living entities.
Upon my retirement, I've decided, that a change could be beneficial for math classes, in form of animated and interactive graphics projected at class, bringing life to the lecture, by involvement of the students. In addition, the interactivity could be used by the students at home or in a library, in order to understand better the learned material. I've tried this successfully, with a small group of students at a summer semester course, of "Introduction to math for physicists". The students just loved the animations.
Although my first intension was to apply the animated and interactive graphics for a course dedicated for students of physics, I've demonstrated some examples of the animations in few international mathematical conferences, which were accepted with great interest. See Mathematics Animations with SVG , which is based on a previous version of Math Animated, and should be open with the Firefox or Safari browser. To my understanding the animated and interactive graphics can be used successfully for students of mathematics also. Since my previous version(2), it was a great improvement in the technology, recommended by the WWW (World Wide Web) consortium, which I am using: SVG - for graphics and MathML for mathematical expressions. That way, the majority of the main browsers (Firefox and Safari) support now those technologies, and others are in advanced stages of improving their support. Firefox can be installed for free, independently of the system, you are using. Safari comes with any Apple system.
More details about the history of MathAnimated.
See also List of other contributors to this work.
If you are a new arrival to "Math Animated", it is imperative to read carefully and experiment the topic Tutorial which will show you, how to use this course-ware. After doing so, you'll become an experienced user, and invited to choose any available topic of calculus (or "tutorial") from the Table of Contents by use of Firefox or Safari browsers.
Next topic: Tutorial