Welcome
About this Site
This site is the former academic web page of David Lane (that's me), Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. In January 2008 I moved on to a new position at the Johns Hopkins Applied Research Laboratory, doing statistical work for the US Navy.
The math/computer science department at UVA Wise has kindly offered to allow me to maintain this page as a repository and developer's space for various math and web related projects. These include instructions for installing and using LaTeX (on WinXP), many useful Mathematica examples, and developers articles on SVG, PHP, CSS and the like.
The PreCalculus Project
After teaching freshman PreCalculus for more than ten years, I have gathered together a huge, rather disorganized collection of notes, handouts, exams and worked problems, all typeset in LaTeX (of course).
Much of this material was created to supplement the standard commercial textbooks, which in my opinion suffer from many flaws, not the least of which is their price and size.
So I propose to create an "open source" textbook for PreCalculus. The text will be in pdf format, available for free download, designed for a one or two semester review course for university students majoring in the sciences. At the same time a parallel, online text will be developed using W3C compliant MathML and SVG formats wherever possible.
IE users may require additional plugins to display these formats; even then some links may contain inline XML which IE cannot display. Firefox and other browsers, on the other hand, may need additional MathML fonts. See the System Requirements link for details.
For the moment the PreCalculus link above leads to a construction site. But I hope to have an outline and a couple of sample sections soon. Check back frequently.