There is a recent trend among universities to upload content, often free, on the web. YouTube, capitalising on this trend, launched its education channel YouTube EDU last year. Last month, it made it international and found strong support from nearly 45 institutions of higher learning in Europe and Israel. Check out these educational online videos today.

To access YouTube EDU, please click here.

MathGV is a mathematical function graphing software program for Windows XP, 2003 and Vista. It can plot 2 dimensional, parametric, polar, and 3 dimension functions.

The software interface is dialogue driven and allows changes to any setting at any time with immediate results. This instant visual feedback makes mathematical functions much easier to understand.

The software can be downloaded via the MathGV website.

The University of Nottingham has created a collection of videos on sixty symbols (or concepts) commonly used in physics and astronomy. The project is known as Sixty Symbols.  The videos are not lectures, they are chats with the experts from the university . It also promises to have another sixty symbols coming soon.

Gnuplot is a portable command-line driven interactive data and function plotting utility for UNIX, IBM OS/2, MS Windows, DOS, Macintosh, VMS, Atari and many other platforms.

It was originally intended as to allow scientists and students to visualize mathematical functions and data but has grown to support many other uses such as web scripting and integration. Gnuplot supports many types of plots in either 2D and 3D. It can draw using lines, points, boxes, contours, vector fields, surfaces and various associated text.

The software can be downloaded via the Gnuplot website.

Launched by NCBI, Rapid Research Notes (RRN) “allows users to access and cite research that is provided through participating publisher programs designed for immediate communication.”

The RRN archive was prompted in part by the spring 2009 worldwide outbreak of H1N1 influenza and the call for a means to quickly share research information about this critical and emergent public health threat. To address the influenza information sharing need, the Public Library of Science developed PLoS Currents: Influenza, the first collection being archived in RRN.

MIT OpenCourseWare offers MIT course materials for free! Almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT are available.

At the MIT OpenCourseWare site, click the “Courses” tab,  follow the physics link and you can go to the individual Course Title to get more information about the course before you begin. Some other subjects that you may be interested include

• Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
• Experimental Study Group (some relavant courses!)
• Materials Science and Engineering
• Mathematics
• Nuclear Science and Engineering
• Science, Technology, and Society

Have a go! You may find some courses relevant, to help you in your learning.

A problem at the interface of two mathematical areas, topology and algebraic geometry, that was formulated by Friedrich Hirzebruch, had resisted all attempts at a solution for more than 50 years. The problem concerns the relationship between different mathematical structures. Professor Dieter Kotschick, a mathematician at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, has now achieved a breakthrough (PNAS, 9 June 2009). Click here to read more.

Will WolframAlpha be a bane or blessing to teaching? The service will affect more than just mathematics classrooms, since it can be used in economics, physics, chemistry, statistics, and other disciplines.

Click here for different views on the service.

With the popularity of Internet, many mathematicians are interested to communicate their thoughts and research findings using mathematical notations on the Web.  However, writing mathematics symbols in HTML is not easy. Therefore, it would be good if there is a tool that can help in this aspect.

MathTex Bookmarklet is a useful utility that produces the image containing the symbolic representation of your input codes.  The steps for installation and use of this bookmarklet are provided below.

Installation of MathTex Bookmarklet

- Internet Explorer: Right click on this link “MathTex Bookmarklet” and select “Add to Favorites”.
- Mozilla Firefox: Right click on this link “MathTex Bookmarklet” and select “Bookmark This Link”.

Use of MathTex Bookmarklet

- Internet Explorer: Click on Favourites -> MathTex Bookmarklet -> Enter expression to be converted -> Click OK
- Mozilla Firefox: Click on Bookmarks- > MathTex Bookmarklet -> Enter expression to be converted -> Click OK

This is how the expression “\sum_{i=1}^n i = \frac{n(n+1)}{2}” is converted to   in this post.

ScienceHack is a unique video search engine for science videos. It’s indicated on the search engine that every science video on ScienceHack is screened by a scientist to verify its accuracy and quality…

Click here to try it out!