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 to on The Math Doctors) will soon be transferred to new ownership and again be available. We will let you know when such a change occurs.
Until now I have been using my backlog of topics for the blog, accessing pages through The Wayback Machine; but as it has become impossible to search for relevant pages on new topics, I am stopping the weekly posts based on the archive, and will be only posting weekly about recent questions. This coincides with the start of summer, when I am happy to have a little less to do; and it also fits with the original plan to eventually focus on new material. When the archives become available again, I will return to using them, but perhaps less often. There is still a lot of material worth revisiting.
Until then, if you need to access a page I’ve linked to (in early posts I often left out much of their contents), you can type in the address at https://web.archive.org/ . Here is the home page.
Thank you.
So grateful for the resources.
UPDATE
I have been notified that it is now possible to access the Ask Dr. Math archives at a slightly different address, https://www.nctm.org/drmath/, by creating a free NCTM account. (If you are not a teacher, just pretend you are.)
I will eventually change links on our site to the new locations, once everything is stable. Until then, you can manually change an address like
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/59206.html
to
https://www.nctm.org/archives/library/drmath/view/59206.html
in order to access it. That is, replace “http://mathforum.org” with “https://www.nctm.org/archives”.
Unfortunately, it appears that there is currently no way to search the archives. I am continuing to request that issues like this be addressed.
Mathforum was great. I still have an email conversation with one Dr. Math regarding why derivative is not treated as a ratio. Sh/He explained the concept very well patiently and cleared all my doubts. Those were the days when we had free internet without restrictions/privacy concerns enabling people to communicate their thoughts one on one…
I’d like to emphasize that we on this site not only post articles about new and old questions, but also answer your questions just as we did on the old site. Just use the Ask a Question button above, to go to the form for asking questions, and you’ll get an email with a link to the answer.
Thank you for continuing the forum under new name.
It is sad that NCTM took possession of that and is making it available to members only. The content was not generated by or for NCTM members only.
To clarify, NCTM supported The Math Forum for a while, making them the last owners of it, so it is not quite accurate to say they “took possession” of it; and it is now available freely to non-members if they make a free account.
The continuing problems involve the content not being searchable, so that those who need it can’t find it; and the implication that what we wrote was primarily for teachers, rather than as it was and is, namely for students and users of math, as well as teachers, throughout the world.