Fall 2003 Sabbatical

In the Fall 2003 semester John worked on a sabbatical whose purpose was to study and report on the mathematical markup language named MathML. MathML is a worldwide formal standard for encoding mathematics in an electronic form for the purpose of computer processing and electronic communication, usually accomplished through using the Internet and its related technologies. In simple terms, MathML is intended to do for mathematics what HTML does with regular text for the rest of the world. MathML has the honor of being the very first application of XML.

The main results from John's sabbatical study are in the 117 page technical report titled JKMathMLTechReport.pdf that is available for download. This technical report is for persons interested in learning some of the technical details of the markup language MathML and assumes you have a strong math and computer background. There are two other reports designed for persons without technical backgrounds that are named JKMathMLGeneralReport.pdf and JKMathMLGeneralMovie.exe. The general report contains some history related to computers and mathematicians. The movie is a 16-minute video that shows some 3D graphic applications of math. (The movie is a large 63MB download.)

In addition to the above three reports there are three auxillary Windows programs that are available as downloads. These programs are intended to be used by people with technical backgrounds and are for converting math expressions to MathML, and for creating tables of Unicode characters.

1. JKMathML is a program a program for converting typewritten math expressions into either content MathML or presentation MathML.

2. BODH is a little utility program that automatically converts numbers between Binary, Octal, Decimal and Hexadecimal notations. This is useful when working with Unicode charts and other applications that primarily depend on numbers expressed in hexadecimal notation. BODH also makes it easy to convert integers to HTML color values and RGB color values.

3. TableMaker is a program for creating tables of Unicode characters.

Another file contains the Source Code for the above three programs. These programs were written in the object-oriented Pascal computer language named Delphi; an integrated development environment for both Windows and Linux, made by Borland International.

Downloadable Software, Downloadable Papers, Class Downloads, Published Textbooks