Date: October 31, 1997
Project Director Steve Cavrak (CIT) and Dave Dummit
(Mathematics)
E-mail: Steve.Cavrak@Uvm.Edu and Dave.Dummit@Uvm.Edu
Address: 238 Waterman Building
Phone: (802)656-1483
Project Title: Mathematica Site License
Proposed Start Date: May 1998
Proposed Completion Date: May 2001
Describe specifically the process to be addressed, the reasons to change, the benefits that will be realized, dollar savings or otherwise, and the period of time for realizing any savings.
The Mathematica Site License Project aims to enhance the teaching and practice of mathematics across the University. Mathematica is the system for doing mathematics developed by Stephen Wolfram and has found use in every mathematical endeavor from teaching Calculus 1 to research in cosmology and general relativity. (See http://www.wolfram.com/) Mathematica has been part of the UVM Math 121 sequence for 7 years (see http://www.emba.uvm.edu/~dummit/math121.html).
The current license for Mathematica, however, is limited to use within the EMBA-CF lab facilities - students in the calculus course use Mathematica during scheduled lab periods. The version of software available has not been updated since 1993 having been purchased and updated through NSF research grants. Course evaluations for Math often mention the lack of available Mathematica resources as well as the slowness of the current version. This project proposes to address these issues by providing a 3 year maintained campus-wide site license - extending the availability to students in any course of study and to faculty in any discipline.
The site license will permit running Mathematica on any university owned Macintosh, Unix, Windows 95, or Windows NT machine. In addition, a special "client" program, called the Mathematica Reader is available that enables any network workstation to be used to prepare Mathematica problems and "ship them off" to a more powerful server for "number crunching." This product will be especially useful for students on and off campus who have limited local computing resources but a network connection to zoo or emba.
List specific resources requested and costs (total costs and that portion being requested from UIT), and identify resources to maintain the process including personnel and equipment maintenance and purchases after this funded project is completed. If you are specifically asking for project management assistance, so indicate. Your unit's Budget Director must be prepared to acknowledge any proposed cost sharing.
Included Items: (Note: numbers have been round up to include a small contingency element, but not to include for expected price rises.)
The Department of Mathematics and the EMBA Computation facility are each willing to commit $2,000 per year to the purchase and maintenance of the license.
Total Budget: $45,000 (Year 1 $17,000; Year 2 and Year 3 $14,000)
Please provide specific details of how you will measure the success of your project, including references where appropriate, to the six key success factors described above.
We will generate several ways to measure the success of the project, including:
Beyond UIT funding, please identify any anticipated barriers to successful implementation of the project.
The current project is envisioned as a three year project - recognizing that significant improvement in course and research work takes time. A "one year" project has the difficulty of convincing faculty to take it seriously enough to change known and reliable working methods on an experiment that may not be here next year.
Feel free to provide any additional relevant information about your project.
The project team includes
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Name of Budget Director / Date