The discipline we call Language Arts is loaded with people whose names are familiar to almost everyone - Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Stephen King. Social studies, by virtue of its historical focus, includes the names of our presidents and other well-known political figures, but also includes such familiar names as Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. Science has its Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein. However, when we move to that other core discipline - mathematics - the people disappear. The overwhelming majority of students, when asked, cannot name a single mathematician, and those who can will generally name 2,000-year-old Greeks - Euclid or Pythagoras. The recent history of mathematics is almost unknown and ignored by both teachers and students, even though that history is no less rich and colorful than the history of any other discipline.

Why is this so? Perhaps it is because the study of mathematics has been, historically, more about learning procedures and processes than trends and personalities. After all, one need know nothing about the rivalry between Newton and Gottfried Leibniz to do the calculus they so ably pioneered. But that lost history causes us to miss the context which gives the calculus its importance, significance, and human interest. We are raising students who think that mathematics is an empty, colorless collection of procedures - frozen in time, and irrelevant to their post-secondary lives.

Such is also the nature of computer technology, though, to add to its difficulties, its history is so recent that many still do not see it as that of a discipline - a subject with an importance which ranks as high as the other content areas.  The few names we know - Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are two - are mostly in our minds because of the money they've made rather than their importance and relevance to our lives.  But the history of computers and connectivity is no less rich than any other, and the people are by no means all nerds with no fashion sense!

From almost the beginning, TIPS has included some snippets of technology history - if you placed your mouse pointer over the banner picture at the top of each issue's home page, text would pop up to describe what you saw. There have been a small number of people  amongst the hardware - Adam Osborne in April, 2002, Blaise Pascal in September, 2002, and  Herman Hollerith in January, 2003. Beginning with this issue, TIPS, with the help of Henry Clay High School's Tony Ho and the rest of the members of Henry Clay's STLP chapter, we will be adding to that collection.

       --Jeffrey L. Jones, Editor