Daniel E. Otero Assistant Professor Department of Mathematics & Computer Science Xavier University.

Courses I'm teaching now (Fall 2001):

• MATH 120-31 Elementary Functions (MWF 10:30-11:20, Schott 200)
• MATH 120-41 Elementary Functions (MWF 11:30-12:20, Schott 200)
• MATH 220-54 Calculus III (MF 12:30-1:20, Alter 222; TR 1:00-2:15, Alter 223)

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Courses I'm working on:

• New course: Milestones in Mathematics

Stuff I'm really interested in professionally:

History of Mathematics

• I am cofounder of the Ohio River Early Sources in Mathematical Exposition (ORESME) Reading Group, a biannual seminar in the Cincinnati area that meets to read significant original sources in mathematics.  The ORESME home page is maintained by my colleague, Dan Curtin at NKU.
• The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive at St. Andrews, Scotland, is one of the neatest sites that exists on the Web.  It is a substantial compendium of all sorts of information about important mathematics and mathematicians of history.
• David Joyce at Clark University maintains a great page on the history of mathematics.
• I spent three weeks each during the summers of 1996 and 1997 at the Institute on History of Mathematics and Its Use in Teaching (IHMT) at American University in Washington, DC.  The Institute was organized under the auspices of the Mathematical Association of America and was funded by the NSF through their Undergraduate Faculty Enhancement program.
• One of my distinguished colleagues at the IHMT, Ed Sandifer (Western Connecticut State University), has launched the Euler Project, of which I am a member. The Project aims to prepare English translations of as much of the mathematical opus of the great eighteenth century mathematician, Leonhard Euler.
• David Calvis at Baldwin-Wallace College (Berea, OH) has a wonderful page of mathematics history stuff.
• David Wilkins of Trinity College, Dublin, maintains this nice page of historical resources.
• The International Study Group on the Relations Between History and Pedagogy of Mathematics, an affiliate of the International Commission on Mathematics Instruction, has a newsletter and annual meetings.
• The Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Mathematics has just started a very interesting web page.  Speaking of which, Tom Archibald at Acadia University in Nova Scotia has prepared a nice page of interesting links to mathematical resources.
• Jeff Miller's project on the earliest known uses of many mathematical terms is fascinating and under continuous revision.

Specific resources arranged chronologically

• An article by Don Allen on Babylonian mathematics.
• A very nice bibliography on Babylonian mathematics by Eleanor Robson at Oxford.
• Images of pages from some of the rare books in the Vatican collection of Greek mathematics.
• There are a number of sites devoted to Euclid's Elements, easily the most influential work in all of mathematics:
• Ralph Abraham maintains the Visual Elements of Euclid site.
• David Joyce maintains another site focus on the Elements of Euclid.
• A page devoted to Archimedes by Chris Rorres at Drexel University.
• Antreas Hatzipolakis has prepared the following Bibliographia Archimedeana.
• Sudheer Birodkar has a nice article on Indian mathematics.
• The Maya calendar site (maintained at the Maya World Studies Center in Mérida, Yucatán, México) has a good article on Maya mathematics.
• A simple page that displays some beautiful images of Chinese mathematics lives at a site prepared under the auspices of the COLOR (Cultural Online Learning Organization and Resource) After-school Program. Follow the links to more pretty pages.
• Japanese sangaku (temple geometry problems) are exhibited at this page by Hiroshi Kotera. There is a related page showing how sangi are used to solve polynomial equations.
• The Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale and the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, both of Florence, Italy, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin have prepared an electronic publication of the Ms. Gal. 72, a manuscript by Galileo Galilei.
• Andrew McNab at the University of Manchester (England) has put together a page devoted to Isaac Newton which he calls Newtonia.
• Biographies of Women Mathematicians are being prepared by students at Agnes Scott College.
• My colleague here at Xavier, Sheila Doran, has designed a course called (MATH 114) Women in Mathematics.
• Manya Raman at UC Berkeley has posted her Masters thesis on the history of compactness in analysis and topology.
• A site with a number of resources on the history of computing is maintained by the Ancient Computing Machinery Project.
• An enormous collection of information  is housed at the Virtual Museum of Computing by Jonathan Bowen at the University of Reading (England).

Number Theory

• Check out the Prime Page, the prime source of information on prime numbers!  It is maintained by Chris Caldwell at the University of Tennessee at Martin.
• There is also an interesting page kept by Chen Shuwen (at Jiang Xing Electronic Ltd., in Jiangmen City, Peoples' Republic of China) on equal sums of like powers of integers.

General Mathematics

Organizations

• The Mathematical Association of America
• Ohio Section
• The American Mathematical Society

Web Resources

• World Wide Web Virtual Library of Mathematics
• The European Mathematical Society's MATH Database
• The Math Forum
• Eric's Treasure Trove of Mathematics has been shut down by CRC Press.  What a shame.
• The Digits Project
• The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, created by Neil Sloane, is one of the most incredible sites on the web.  Look up any important sequence of integers and find out what it is and who has written about it.  Also a neat way to determine the next term of the sequence!
• Plouffe's Inverter: a database of mathematical constants
• Another page devoted to important mathematical constants
• ...and another
• Ackermann's function: a set of short articles
• The Jordan Curve Theorem: another short article

Computing

with MAPLE

• Waterloo Maple (current release is Maple7) has an Applications Center and a Student Center as a resource for using the software.
• MUG, the Maple Users Group, is an invaluable resource.
• A comprehensive source of links to a lrge number of resources, packages, pages, etc. is kept by Alejandro Jakubi at his Maple on the Web page.

with TI calculators

• Texas Instruments has a resource site for college level users of its calculators.

Libraries

• Xavier University Library's electronic catalog, Xplore.
• Washington Research Libraries Consortium (DC), which includes American University with its Artemas Martin Collection of mathematics books.
• The University of Michigan Library is one of the best in the country. When you telnet there, login with the word "mirlyn" (Thanks to Fred Rickey for this telnet link).
• The Robert H. Goddard Library at Clark University has a fine collection of late nineteenth-century mathematics.
• A collection of old mathematics books kept at Georgia Tech University.
• Here are some of the more fascinating objects in the collections at Columbia University. (My favorite is Plimpton 322.)

The Teaching of Mathematics

• The MAA maintains a Teaching and Learning page as part of their online service.
• The ATLAST project, led by Steve Leon (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth), was created to improve the teaching of linear algebra, especially in the light of how electronic computing packages like MATLAB?now widely available?can transform the learning experiences of students.

Courses in the history of mathematics

• Fred Rickey at Bowling Green State University has designed a minicourse on Teaching a Course on the History of Mathematics.
• This is a course taught by Len Berggren at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC.
• This course belongs to Phill Schultz at the University of Western Australia in Nedlands, Australia.
• This course was designed by Chuck Lindsey at Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers, FL.
• A very interesting minicourse on XVII-century mathematics given by Fernando Gouvea at Colby College, Waterville, ME.
• Mary Garner of Emory University in Atlanta, GA, has written an article on teaching mathematics with history.
• Gregory Crane, Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Project ("a digital resource for studying the ancient world"), teaches a course on Greek Science at Tufts University, Boston, MA.

Textbook Publishers: a list of publishers of college mathematics textbooks.

• Academic Press
• Addison Wesley Longman
• Cambridge University Press
• Elsevier/North Holland/Pergammon
• Everyday Learning
• HarperCollins
• Houghton Mifflin
• Jones & Bartlett
• Klüwer
• Macmillan
• Marcel Dekker
• McGraw Hill
• Oxford University Press
• Prentice Hall
• Princeton University Press
• Saunders
• Springer-Verlag
• W H Freeman
• Wiley
• Worth

Booksellers

• Significant Books here in Cincinnati
• Powell's Bookstore in Portland, OR
• Interloc in Southworth, WA
• Bibliofind, a rare books seller in Great Barrington, MA
• Octavo, preparing digital productions of rare books in Palo Alto, CA
• Adopt-a-Book will prepare a digital copy of a rare book (for a fee)
• Bibliocity deals in rare books

Other cool stuff:

Bridge

• I run the Xavier Univerity Bridge Marathon, a 16-pair social party bridge game. We play 8 times a year, once a month, October to May; the October and May sessions are on campus and the others are at members' homes. Each meeting involves two tables (4 pairs) and 6 hands per table for a total of 18 hands. Current standings for the 2001-2002 season will be posted here soon.
• For the more adventurous, see the American Contract Bridge League home page.
• I like to check in on the Deal of the Week at Bridgebase; it's a great learning tool.

Maps

• There are a few wonderful map resources on the Web.  My favorite is MapBlast.

Radio

• Check out WVXU, for my taste, the best radio in the Tristate area.  One of the local public radio stations, it carries a number of NPR programs, including Morning Edition (weekends, too!), This American Life, Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, and Sight and Sound.  It also carries some of the best PRI programs: Echoes, and A Prarie Home Companion.

E-zines

• I really like Salon magazine; it's hip and well-produced.
• While not a magazine, the New York Times is the best newspaper in the world, even if you don't live in the City.
• I'll also provide a link to the Cincinnati Enquirer for you.

The Weather, etc.

• My wife claims that we spend $50 a month for cable just so that I can watch the Weather Channel.  She's right, almost.  Here's their forecast for the Cincinnati area.
• Öand here's the home page of the best show on TV, bar none: The Power Puff Girls!!  You go, girls.

Last revised: November 30, 2000