Illustration of magnetic bead moving along a helix with tangent vector and vector corresponding to a magnetic field.
Highlighted pages
- An introduction to the directional derivative and the gradient
Interactive graphics about a mountain range illustrate the concepts behind the directional derivative and the gradient of scalar-valued functions of two variables. - The cross product
Introduction to the cross product with a focus on its basic properties. Includes an interactive graphic to illustrate these properties of the cross product. - A line or a plane or a point?
Examples showing how the graph of an equation depends on the underlying dimension, becoming a line or a point or a plane. - The components of the curl
Illustration of the meaning behind the components of the curl. - Introduction to differentiability in higher dimensions
An introduction to the basic concept of the differentiability of a function of multiple variables. Discussion centers around the existence of a tangent plane to a function of two variables.
Recent pages
- A birth-death process
Added April 13, 2022 - A stochastic process introduction
Added April 13, 2022 - An introduction to neural coding and decoding
Added April 3, 2022 - More new items
Highlighted applets
Illustration of magnetic bead moving along a helix with tangent vector and vector corresponding to a magnetic field.
The level curves of an elliptic paraboloid are shown as the intersection of a horizontal plane with the graph.
Welcome to Math Insight
The Math Insight web site is a collection of pages and applets designed to shed light on concepts underlying a few topics in mathematics. The focus is on qualitative description rather than getting all technical details precise. Many of the pages were designed to be read even before students attend lecture on the topic, so they are intended to be somewhat readable introductions to the basic ideas.
You can browse the pages organized into threads, which are sequences through a subset of pages organized by particular topics. An index can help you find pages discussing a particular term. You can also search through the pages, applets, and image captions. A few pages allow you to change the notation system used to render the mathematics.
We hope Math Insight can help you understand key mathematical concepts. We welcome comments on how we can improve it.