What’s New at BrownMath.com

This page tracks significant updates to the site. Smaller changes are tracked in the “What’s New” sections of the individual pages.

See also: What Happened at OakRoadSystems.com? shows the update history of my other site, OakRoadSystems.com, from its beginning in May 2000 to the final move of all remaining pages to BrownMath.com in December 2021.

March 2022

Added significant new material to How to Solve Polynomial Equations.

February 2022

Added more tips in Windows 10 Tips and Tweaks.

January 2022

New articles:Windows 10 Tips and Tweaks and Windows 10 Calculator Shortcut Keys.

December 2021

• My other web site, OakRoadSystems.com, merged into this one. The files from OakRoadSystems.com are in the groups Free Software Utilities and General Articles. In the process, I made a number of improvements: see the “What’s New” sections of the individual pages if you’re interested in details.
• Added the first version of Windows 10 Tips and Tweaks. Further tips will be added to this article over the next weeks or months.
• New article: Antonin Rejcha — Who Knew?.

November 2021

• Ran a long-overdue link check, and updated links accordingly or found replacements for links to resources that were no longer available. Most of the latter were on mathforum.org, a/k/a “Ask Dr. Math,” which was taken over by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics earlier this year and made unavailable.

  Also changed internal links of the form …directory/ to …directory/index.htm. This might shave a few nanoseconds off the server’s response time, but the real reason is to let me do a full link check on my computer before uploading pages to the server.

July 2021

• Added a statement of advertising policy to the “About” page.

May 2021

• New article: How Bright Is That Star (or Planet)?, with accompanying workbook.

November 2020

• Updated Differences among TI-83s and TI-84s and the TI-83/84/89/92 index page with multiple developments at Texas Instruments since the initial release of the TI-84 Plus CE.
• Updated How to Graph Functions on TI-83/84 and How to Graph Piecewise Functions on TI-83/84 for capablities of color TI-84s.

October/November 2020

With the help of the kind folks at the Usenet newsgroup comp.​infosystems.​www.​authoring.​html, particularly Jukka Korpela, I am updating every page on the site to meet modern standards:

• Server headers now identify the character set as Windows-1252, which should fix garbage characters for the readers who got them. (Previously, the server didn’t send any information about the character set, which was a problem because of the next bullet point.) I used the W3C’s i18n [internationalization] checker to verify that the server was now sending correct and complete headers.
• Pages now identify themselves as using the character set Windows-1252, not utf-8 as formerly. The pages were always in the Windows-1252 character set (well, really ISO-8859-1, but in the Web world the two are synonyms), and the identification as utf-8 was a pure blunder on my part. Truly, nothing good comes of lying to the browser.
• Pages now validate against HTML5, and contain an appropriate DOCTYPE declaration. Previously, they were validated against HTML 4.01. Since the W3C’s command-line HTML5 validator is stricter than the NSGMLS validator I was using to check against HTML 4.01, findng and fixing these additional errors may help some browsers to do a better job of displaying pages.
• Character references &#129–&#255 (accented letters, curly quotation marks, em and en dashes, and some other symbols) are being replaced with the actual characters, which should look no different on your screen but make files somewhat smaller.
• Many pages used just the first character of a radical sign, like this: √(62+45). They now use a standard radical sign with overbar, √62+45, which eliminates a layer of parentheses and should be easier to read.
• Variable names are being italicized, in accordance with the ISO 80000-2 standard for printing.

I started these changes in mid-October and finished them in mid-November — except for italicizing variable names, which is still in progress. You may not notice any of these changes, but if you do see anything wrong, please tell me about it.

October 2020

• Several page titles changed, from the form “Graphing” to the form “How to Graph”, which sounds more inviting.

September 2020

• Added an Excel workbook to Probability of Shared Birthdays, and updated the text to match.

May 2020

• Made quite a lot of revisions to Medical False Positives and False Negatives, including much new material and a new Excel workbook to show the calculations.

July 2019

• Following a suggestion by Ernest Brock, modified two tests for equality in the MATH200A and MATH200B programs, to compensate for the calculator’s handling of floating point.

July 2018

• Added a page of reader comments.

June 2018

• Gave the Site Map a bit of a facelift, for a cleaner appearance.

May 2018

• Published our privacy policy.

October 2017

• New article: About the Author, prompted by a query from a reader — who got more of an answer than she bargained for!

May 2017

• Google searches and other links to Google are now https instead of http.
• Links displayed when you print BrownMath.com pages are now https instead of http. (The pages themselves have been https since January.)

January 2017

• BrownMath.com is now served up as secure HTML (https protocol). All old bookmarks are redirected automatically.

October–December 2016

• The textbook Trig without Tears got a long-overdue makeover. I added more examples, more pictures, and a set of practice problems (with full solutions) for every chapter. There’s a new chapter on how trig sheds light on complex numbers, and new or rewritten sections in several other chapters. The asides that were in a separate Notes chapter have moved, as BTWs, to the chapters where they are most relevant.
• On the algebra front, there’s a new article, Denesting Radicals (or Unnesting Radicals).

July 2016

• New article: It’s Not the Heat … contains calculations for finding heat index, dew point, and relative humidity. There’s also an Excel workbook, which does the same calculations for you painlessly.
• Dew Point, Relative Humidity, and Heat Index on TI-83/84 now contains a link to the new article.

May 2016

• Added a new program to compute Dew Point, Relative Humidity, and Heat Index on TI-83/84.
• Improved the interpretation of kurtosis in Measures of Shape: Skewness and Kurtosis.
• Some citations listed in the Sources Used section of the Stats without Tears weren’t actually used in the book. Moved them to the Web pages where they are used.

April 2016

• The TRIANGLE program adds the case where you know two angles and the area. I also added this to the table of solving methods in Trig without Tears.

March 2016

• For students using the older M20083A program instead of MATH200A, two updates about checking for normal distribution. MATH200A Program part 4 now has the formula for the critical number. And Checking Data Sets, in Chapter 7 of Stats without Tears, points to the formula.

February 2016

• Change “What’s Different between TI-83 and TI-84?” to Differences among TI-83s and TI-84s. Update the article for the color models of TI-84, and firmware upgrades to the black&white models.

January 2016

• All the Excel workbooks in the statistics and business sections of the site are now in Excel 2007–2016 format.
• Trig without Tears had a vintage 2002 program for solving triangles on the TI-83. I thoroughly overhauled it and made it compatible with all TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus models, including the new color models, then moved it to a new article with worked examples and screen shots.
• I was using obsolete code for the Donate button, and it took you to a PayPal page that didn’t even mention BrownMath.com. (Still, thanks to the people who persevered and made donations!) I’ve fixed that.
• The site map now includes icons for TI-83/84 procedures.
• Several articles weren’t referenced from the site map or the section index pages; now they all are.
• “Binomial Probability Distribution on TI-83/84” is withdrawn, because the textbook does a better job.

December 2015

The MATH200B program didn’t display well with the new color TI-84 models, TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and TI-84 Plus CE. I first created separate programs for the new calculators, but that was a dead-end approach.

Both MATH200B and MATH200A now sense whether they’re running on a high-resolution TI-84, and adjust their display format accordingly. Sometimes that even lets one screen hold the information of two screens on the older calculators.

August 2015

• Added: new group of articles on algebra and trigonometry, moved from OakRoadSystems.com.
• Added: course pages for Fall 2015 statistics at TC3.
• Added: Site Map.
• Redesigned: home page.

May 2015

New Web site!