The history of a history
In 1988 the mathematicians at St Andrews acquired a teaching laboratory of 30 Apple Macintosh Plus computers. It was our intention to use these to show students how to experiment with mathematics without necessarily having to know how to program a computer. We found that there was no suitable software available, so we were forced to write our own.
Fortunately we had access to a very innovative application called HyperCard which made it possible to produce some clever teaching material very quickly. As well as producing the usual facilities for plotting functions, sitting quizzes, etc. we were able to implement some ingenious ideas for exploring different areas of mathematics.
One of the things we added quite early on was a certain amount of material on the history of mathematics. HyperCard allowed us to attach buttons to move around inside our system and so we could arrange that if a student was experimenting with, say the Euclidean algorithm, then they could click a button and be taken to a biography of Euclid, or if they were looking at Platonic solids they could go to Plato’s biography. Our early system had links to a few hundred of the most well-known mathematicians as well as a collection of essays on the history of various mathematical areas. (These eventually became the History Topics section in our history archive.)
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