ICTCM 2008, International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics, took place last week in San Antonio, TX. The attendance this year has been the largest since 9/11 and the program was split over 9 parallel sessions in 2 days, which made it real hard to choose a presentation to attend. Tablet PCs seemed to be a great hit but in the talks I attended nobody mentioned the problem of handwritten recognition of mathematical formulas. Since this issue came up twice in the last two weeks, (in the accessible science workshop also), I decided to look into the progress after the Pen-Based Interfaces for Mathematical Documents session at CMDE in 2006. What is new? Bruce Char and Stephen Watt have a recent paper on "Representing and Characterizing Handwritten Mathematical Symbols Through Succinct Functional Approximation". Unfortunately, neither PenMath, nor Mathbrush seem to distribute their software. Hss Infty given up on handwritten math recognition? The commercial XThink offers a free trial version of their calculator. By googleing, I also found Loren Heiny's math applications on his blog where he mentions the issue of math search, among a lot of other things like Flash support in iPhones. This last topic was also mentioned during Lila Roberts talk "Beyond Podcasts: iTouch the Math", she is a firm believer in the appeal of the touch interface of the apple gadgets. Talking gadgets, Maria Andersen showed the smartpen video. She also blogged from ICTCM, so did others, according to technorati.

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