Mathematics is a fundamental discipline in science, technology, engineering, and society. Moreover, fundamental problem solving skills, acquired when learning mathematics properly, such as structuring a problem or a situation, analyzing pre-requisites and implications, go beyond doing mathematics and influence social capabilities and behavior in our increasingly technological society. Yet, the number of undergraduates in mathematics has been decreasing all over Europe in the past 10 years and as a result, there is a lack of new mathematicians able to entice new generations of schoolchildren and to tutor university students.

Crisis of Mathematics Education

One way to overcome the crisis of mathematics education is to improve the didactic tools and the lecture material. Recent technological advances in the representation of mathematics on the web make it possible to create and to deliver high-quality, interactive mathematical content to users’ computers worldwide. Centres of excellence in mathematical research and education are scattered across the continent and all too often their efforts fail to add up in the absence of an efficient system for collaboration. In Europe alone, educators of mathematics lecture students in about 4000 establishments of higher education every day of the week. They hold basic classes consisting of more or less the same notions but they cannot share the didactic material with each other because they are unaware of a suitable language-independent easy-to-use platform. It is an enormous waste of human resources in an area where lack of teachers is an increasing problem. Numerous educational institutions have to meet a growing demand for teaching with diminishing resources.

It is clear that students, regardless of their location or language, have to learn a common corpus of basic mathematical facts. They should all have easy access to a structured multi-lingual and multi-cultural repository of mathematical lectures, notes, problems and test questions, whereby they could train develop skills independent of time, place and pace. In the OpenMath Project and the Thematic Network that followed it, the European Union supported the development of OpenMath and MathML , two complementary standards for content and presentation markup of mathematics. The original intention was that these would be used to exchange mathematical objects between software systems, and to facilitate the development of active texts where the mathematical components could be extracted, manipulated and checked. As such, these technologies have been a great success and are now being used in advanced e-Learning projects such as LeActiveMath Serving Mathematics , iClass , and WebALT .

Training the New Mathematics Authors

However we still have to raise and train a new generation of authors who are informed about the advantages of using mathematical markup, and who are willing to devote the extra effort that is still needed to produce high-quality materials. Current authors see no benefit in learning new technologies. This results in a scarce production of semantically marked up digital content even when new tools become available to produce much better material.