Mathematics for Computational Physics on the Web
Summer 2000 CPUG Project
CPUG Project
David Vediner was a member of group that spent the summer of 2000
working in Corvallis on the "CPUG" project:
"Curricula and Materials for a Research-Rich Undergraduate Degree in
Computational Physics". This project is led by Rubin Landau and is
developing a four-year undergraduate curriculum leading to a
Bachelor's degree in Computational Physics. The courses, texts, and
seminars are research- and Web rich, and culminate in an Advanced
Computational Physics Laboratory. This lab will be derived from
graduate theses and from research at national laboratories and NPACI
application thrust areas. There are important places for Maple, Java,
MathML, MatLab, C and Fortran in the curriculum. The homepage for the
project is at http://www.physics.orst.edu/~rubin/CPUG/.
Need for MathML
Since the Web has a big place in this project, and since we are
developing materials that we plan to be published in paper as well as
in interactive electronic formats using Web technologies, it is
essential that our materials be as flexible and accessible to the
disabled as possible. Since it is often very difficult, if not
impossible, to "fix up" materials after they have been created, it is,
important that from the start the materials being developed use the
latest and most accessible Web technologies.
In the past our Web developments in Computational Science and
Computational Physics has faced a dilemma. While the language of
physics is mathematics, placing mathematics on the Web has been
problematic; most equations appear as bit-mapped pictures with no
information as to their true content. This makes them inaccessible to
screen readers for the disabled as well as unable to interact with
symbolic manipulations programs such as Maple and
Mathematica. Accordingly, while a student can view an equation while
reading it electronically, he or she cannot manipulate it or find out
more about it.
David Vediner's project during the Summer of 2000 was to explore the
potential success of our developing curricula materials with the LaTeX
tools with which we are familiar, and then being able to convert them
into MathML and XML formats. Accomplishing this goal required
assessing the state and effectiveness of MathML/XML-enabled browsers
and of tools that could convert our documents from LaTeX or Word into
MathML.
A report of David's work with link references can be found here.
These results have already been reported to an international summer
school on teaching computational physics, and the experts participants
were surprised that the possibility of MathML is actually becoming a
reality. This has been a most-important confirmation for the CPUG
project.
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