A Modern User Interface for Mathematics Education

Abstract: 

Most contemporary mathematics reference materials are not presented with the goal of imparting understanding to students. In order to be comprehensive, textbooks contain need to contain an unwieldy amount of information on a topic, and it's quite time consuming for a student to sift through it in search of enlightenment. Additionally they must balance many competing ideals - going to quickly or too slowly, presenting too much or too little detail in explanations, and being too formal or informal. In general achieving this balance is almost impossible, since even the most appropriately written textbook will contain arguments that one doesn't understand. However, with a more dynamical user interface, a student can tailor the presentation of the material to address his or her personal requirements. This project aims to develop a prototype of such a user interface, which includes features such as semantic zooming for inference procedures, interactive concept maps, and a parametrization of mathematical knowledge that enables one to quickly pinpoint the information pertinent to a given problem.