MathBook: web technology for interactive mathematical documents

Internet technology is opening up new possibilities for constructing and structuring documents. This paper deals with the efforts of the RIACA group at Eindhoven University of Technology to help shape a new generation of interactive documents, particularly in the field of mathematics. In creating such a new generation of interactive mathematical documents, our research combines web technology with our experience in mathematics teaching. It should be emphasized that for our purposes the web technological side is far from trivial, even though a glance at the internet may easily lead to the impression that this fancy looking world leaves nothing to desire. The fact that web technology development is not primarily driven by mathematical or teaching interests, is a good indication that the combination of mathematics, teaching and web technology forms a field of research that is still open for further exploration. In this paper we outline an architecture we have implemented to realize our ideas so far. We discuss the functionalities that have been included as well as their mathematical motivation, and we focus on teaching aspects. Technical details will be ommitted and discussed elsewhere. We also outline the future plans of RIACA. Our work is a continuation of the research that has led to Algebra Interactive! [3], teaching material which we use at Eindhoven University of Technology for two undergraduate algebra courses.