MadMode

Dan Connolly's tinkering lab notebook

Saying Goodbye to Moore Method math notes and Robert Miner

I'm purging another box of files today: college math & C.S. notes, including a few dozen transparencies I prepared for classes on Topology and Fractals that Dr. Starbird and Dr. Cline taught using the Moore method:

Instead of using a textbook, the students are given a list of definitions and theorems which they are to prove and present in class ...
After Moore became an associate-professor at University of Texas at Austin in 1920, the Moore method began to gain popularity. Today, the University of Texas at Austin remains a strong advocate of the method and uses it in various courses within their mathematics department ...
Metric spaces, hausdorf spaces, cauchy sequences, attractors... I'm sure glad for Wikipedia, because I can hardly follow my own notes; most of it has leaked out.

I thought about capturing one or two formulas for posterity, which reminded me to try Web Equasion, which, amazingly, does handwriting recognition of LaTeX using JavaScript. (hat tip: @therealmaxf). I couldn't quite get it to completely recognize a 1-to-infinity sub/superscript notation, but I noticed the nicely typeset output was rendered with something I didn't recognize: MathJax. Cool! "an open source JavaScript display engine for mathmatics that works in all modern browsers." So I started looking into it...

... which is when I got the sad news about Robert Miner, who was co-chair of the Math Working Group, along with Patrick Ion for much of the time I was at W3C. I didn't work with him extensively, but the Math Working Group was always a class act.