Bringing Mathematics and its History to diverse audiences worldwide

Description of impact

Public engagement with mathematics and its history: the MacTutor Archive

Who is affected

School pupils, teachers, media researchers and journalists, maths popularisers and authors, general public

Narrative

The MacTutor History of Mathematics Web Archive is one of the most accessed resources worldwide for promoting public understanding of mathematics and its history. It includes detailed biographies of around 3000 mathematicians and over 2000 other pages of essays on specific topics and supporting material. It had 11.3 million hits in November 2018, of which 40% were from commercial domains. The twitter feed @mathshistory mainly provides a daily tweet linking to a mathematician of the day on MacTutor, and now has 74.1K followers (Feb 2020). The Archive has been the basis for college courses worldwide and is used as a resource for many popular science books, TV and radio broadcasts and lectures.

The History of Mathematics Group have published over 30 research papers in the past 18 years, As a result of the Archive, Group members receive an ever-increasing number of requests to advise on radio and television programmes as well as on journal and magazine articles. It is a resource for media presentations such as Melvyn Bragg’s Radio 4 ‘In Our Time’ series which has featured Group member Dr Roney-Dougal on several occasions. It is cited as a web-reference in many popular science books, e.g. ‘99 Variations on a Proof’ by Philip Ording (Princeton UP, 2019).

The Archive is widely recognized as a major online educational resource; for example, it is, ‘The premier site on the Web for math history,’ according to a 2015 listing on the Math Forum of Drexel University School of Education in Philadelphia. Similarly, David Calvis of Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio describes MacTutor as, ‘a flagship Internet location for the history of mathematics, and a "must-see" because of the wealth of information it contains.’

The Archive has received many awards, including in 2015 the London Mathematical Society Hirst Prize, awarded in recognition of original and innovative work in the history of mathematics, which may be in any medium. The British Society for the History of Mathematics organised a conference in celebration of MacTutor in September 2016.

Impact status	Open
Category of impact	Public Discourse Impact, Educational Impact (Beyond St Andrews), Practitioner Impact, Cultural, Creative Impact
Impact level	Public benefitted - end stage