User Portlet

Associate Professor of Mathematics at Emory University. Reed College (B.A.) and Columbia University (M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.).

I began learning calculus around 1980, began teaching calculus five or so years after that, and began using Mathematica in teaching calculus about five years after that. I encountered my first computer in college, a DEC PDP-11 running Unix. I taught myself how to use it by programming apps to visualize the calculus and physics concepts I was learning in class. We were lucky to have an alum who made and donated graphics terminals with a phosphorescent screen (no pixels) that had two colors, bright green (excited state) and dark green (unexcited state) that had to be reset whenever you wanted to draw a new picture. Out of that experience, I conceived and began a project for developing a system for doing and visualizing symbolic calculus. I set that aside when I got to grad school and discovered Maple and Macaulay. Then along came Mathematica. The basic point here is that I have a long acquaintance with using computation to support learning mathematics (and physics sometimes) that is both personal and professional. (I also wrote apps for the Apple Lisa and early Macintosh for visualizing mathematics and physics.)

My Wolfram Demonstrations: https://wolfr.am/MichaelRogersDEMO