Mathematics support materials

Discover a library of portable, interactive, web-based support packages to help you learn various mathematical ideas and techniques
Mathematics students with board and iPad mini

About this project

The aim of this project was to produce a library of portable, interactive, web-based support packages to help you learn various mathematical ideas and techniques and to support classroom teaching. 

The packages are in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). These packages introduce the mathematical ideas and their rules, and use the linking capabilities of PDF files to generate exercises and quizzes to allow you to test your understanding of the material with immediate feedback. We have also used our backgrounds in science to construct smaller support packages to show applications of mathematics in science and engineering.

Instructions

These packages may be either worked through online or downloaded and used on any computer. To view the files, you will need the latest (free) version of Acrobat Reader.*

*Note: it is recommended to download the files in case of browser incompatibility.

Using the mathematics support materials is very simple, since the only instruction really needed is that all the selectable links in the PDFs are in green. There are a few basic types of links for you to be aware of:

  • links connecting exercises to their solutions
  • links for the solution to short quizzes
  • links for longer quizzes which provide scores and give correct solutions. 

There are also links in the tables of contents. 

Instructions

The software

This project uses LaTeX and PDF. LaTeX is a variant of TeX, which is the world standard for typesetting mathematics. It produces professional quality output which is universally accepted by scientific publishing companies. We use LaTeX to produce PDF output which can be put on the web. These PDF files are read using the freely available and widely distributed Adobe Acrobat Reader.
These packages were produced using LaTeX. They were then converted into PDF files. The LaTeX code makes much use of various packages which have been developed by D.P. Story.
To post your feedback or comments on the packages please contact us at compmath@plymouth.ac.uk.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to David McMullan for discussions on many aspects of this work and thank Arsen Khvedelidze for his help. We thank HEFCE for funding our work as part of the PPLATO FDTL4 project and our colleagues in PPLATO for useful discussions. We are also grateful to the Higher Education Academy Engineering Subject Centre for funding us via a Mini-Project grant in collaboration with Frank Hamer and LTSN Physical Sciences for a development project grant, in collaboration with Simon Belt, and for the opportunity to present these ideas at various workshops.