http://webmathematics.net

One more week before classes start. In preparation, I am improving my online Introduction to Network Mathematics, which you will now find at http://webmathematics.net. Along the way I am learning how to be dangerous with Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium, a massively juicy collection of software that I have acquired as a concession to my students, who generally consider set theory and eigenvectors to be dry.

With the URL "http://webmathematics.net," I am tipping my cap to Tim Berners-Lee and gang over at http://webscience.org. Their work can be summed up by the picture at right.

I plan to integrate their "Framework for Web Science" with my own course as much as I can. The fact that they are writing for fellow PhDs and I am teaching non-technical college freshman makes this integration non-trivial, to say the least.

Whenever I get discouraged by the gap I am trying to bridge with this integration, I find encouragement in the words of my new patron saint, John Ziman. The same John Ziman who wrote that "publication of fragments of scientific work may well have been the key event in the history of science" also said:

"In my view the gravest weakness in the organization of modern science is the lack of systematic exposition of the consensus at the stage between [scholarly] review article and the undergraduate textbook."

You can find the above quote in Ziman's 1968 monograph, Public Knowledge ("An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science"), specifically in the chapter "Community and Communications."

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