An Introduction to Organics

This page provides an overview of the Proceedings, a quick reference guide to the various mechanisms involved and a list of some of the highlights of the mathactivated articles.

The Proceedings of the Organic Mathematics Workshop is the offspring of a workshop in Experimental Mathematics (held Dec. 12-14 '95) and of an experiment in activated mathematics publishing. In order to explore the issues attached to on-line information, especially documents that are critical to the life and health of academic mathematics, a non-trivial collection of articles have been coupled with a variety of interfaces designed for use within the Web.

In particular, the possibility of connecting powerful mathematical software with on-line text is at the forefront. Mathactivation involves identifying the mathematics within formatted text (in this case LaTeX), separating it out for parsing into an appropriate intermediate format, and then feeding it to an interactive mathematical platform (like Maple). The results are then displayed, allowing the user to manipulate the parameters within the mathematics to explore the content of the text.

Below are a number of examples of how the interfaces appear and function. In addition, several exemplary pages from within the proceedings are highlighted for immediate examination.


Document Map
a graphic map to the various major features of the Proceedings

Document Vault
The Vault provides access to the variety of document formats that are available.

An example of the Annotation Form Interface
Local Extrema of Functions

Interface Tutorial
A simple tutorial demonstrating the integration of the Maple Form Interface and the Annotation Form Interface used throughout the Proceedings

Generic Maple Form Interface
A Web-based cgi-bin script interface to a standard Maple engine

Math on Wheels
An example of the Maple Form Interface

Maple Assisted Animation example 1 and example 2
Two examples of push-pull animation from Maple generated images (requires Netscape)


~ Some Illustrations from the Proceedings ~

Pascal's Triangle: Fast C version or Maple version
from Andrew Granville's article on The Arithmetic Properties of Binomial Coefficients

Roots of Polynomials: Fast C version or Maple version (click on Maple icon)
from Andrew Odlyzko's article on Zeros of polynomials with 0,1 coefficients

Cascade juggling demonstration (996K)
a QuickTime movie for Joe Buhler's article on Juggling Drops and Descents

A discussion of a formula of Newton's for pi
from Bailey, Borwein and Borwein's article on Ramanujan, Modular Equations, and Approximations to Pi or How to compute One Billion Digits of Pi

A demo of the Maple Form interface generating projective planes
from C. W. H. Lam's article on The Search for a Finite Projective Plane of Order 10
(Follow the link and click on the first Maple Leaf icon)

A Card Trick
from W. Haga and S. Robins' associated article On Kruskal's Principle

Hilbert's 1896 proof of the transcendence of pi (in the original)
from Bailey, Borwein and Borwein's article on Ramanujan, Modular Equations, and Approximations to Pi or How to compute One Billion Digits of Pi
(Scanned originals of Hilbert's paper)

Interactive plots on a torus
from R. Corless's article on Continued Fractions and Chaos
(Follow the link and look for "Maple program for graphing arbitrary...")

A variety of examples of mathactivated text using Mathematica
from New Visualization Ideas for Differential Equations by Stan Wagon
- Activated Mathematica Example 1
- Activated Mathematica Example 2
- Activated Mathematica Example 3
- Activated Mathematica Example 4