Organic Mathematics: Mission Statement

Mission Statement

Nov. 9, 1995

The Organic Mathematics Project (OMP) is directed towards the exploration of the emerging network and information technologies within the context of mathematics. Numerous groups around the world are engaged in enhancing the specific aspects of the information highway and its associated processes for transporting data. However relatively few are actively integrating and adapting the raw technological building blocks to suit particular fields of endeavour. In our case, we are interested in incorporating several different mechanisms into a single coherent environment which will support the contributions and interaction between mathematics researchers in the field of experimental mathematics.

In particular we are seeking to offer the following capabilities:

Multi-format access and service (Document Vault)
Hyper-text organization and public access (World Wide Web)
Direct user contribution (CMS Preprint service)
Parsing and operation on mathematical text (M3Plexus)
Public annotation and commentary (Annotate, Co-note and others)

The end product will be a digital proceedings of the Workshop on Organic Mathematics on December 12 to 14, 1995 at Simon Fraser University. It will be formed around a core of extant published articles on experimental and computational mathematics and will include enhancements by the original authors (all of whom will be participating in the workshop) in the form of commentaries, reflections, appendices, activated mathematical exercises and illustrations, biographies and personal information. Subsequently the proceedings will be open to inspection, comment and alteration by the Internet public. Moderated contributions to the articles will be encouraged including additional articles, comments and annotations on the core articles, pointers to related materials and reviews. Direct access to the mathematics within the text will be supported, permitting the reader to actively explore the mathematics contained therein.

The OMP is a collaborative research project involving researchers at the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics (partly supported by Simon Fraser University and the CECM, by the Centre de recherches mathématiques (CRM), TeleLearning Research Network, University of Western Ontario , the Canadian Mathematical Society and by Waterloo Maple Inc.) and in-part involves the development of WWW-based and Maple-assisted tools for document annotation and math activation.

The Organic Mathematics Workshop is the culmination of the first phase of the Multi Modal Mathematics Plexus project. This project is funded over a 3.5 year period as part of the Network Centres of Excellence - Telelearning based out of Simon Fraser University.