Talking about Ask Dr. Math itself.
In January and February of this year, the entire Math Forum site, including Ask Dr. Math, was first moved from http://mathforum.org/ to https://www.nctm.org/tmf/, and then made inaccessible to non-members, by its current owner, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. We are hoping that at least some of this material (the pages we often link …
As many schools get into a new semester, this may be a good time to take a look at ways to use our service as effectively as possible.
In the Ask Dr. Math service, new volunteers went through a period of training (“internship”), first demonstrating their ability to write effectively about math with some example problems, and then answering actual questions under supervision, discussing their answers with a mentor online before they were actually sent out. Once our reliability was confirmed, we were …
While I was setting up The Math Doctors site a year ago, I ran across the following email I received in 1998 inviting people to become Math Doctors. It illustrates well the ethos of the team: In the fall of 1994 the Math Forum at Swarthmore College (then the Geometry Forum) started an email program …
In the first post, I gave a small sampling of questions we’ve had from students, parents, and teachers, all related to school, and discussed how we like to deal with these. But we also get many questions with no direct relation to school. These may come from people who actually use math in their work …
A Sample of Ask Dr. Math, Part 2: Questions Outside of School Read More »
In its more than 20 years, we answered hundreds of thousands of questions on Ask Dr. Math, only a small fraction of which were archived for public access. Those that did not make it into the archive were not bad answers, just not deemed to be of broad enough interest, or unique enough, to be …
A Sample of Ask Dr. Math, Part 1: Questions from School Read More »