Portland High School Students help to update 2500 year-old math book for the digital age.

TIGARD, Ore. - Oct. 17, 2013 - PRLog -- Tigard, OR—10/17/13—Saltire Software has released a new eBook on the iBookstore^sm based on Euclid’s historical treatise, The Elements. This new eBook contains the first 6 books from Euclid’s original work in full color with interactive diagrams that illustrate the propositions dynamically. It was accomplished by high school interns using Geometry Expressions, a program that allows users to create and embed interactive diagrams into eBooks.

Over the last 6 years Saltire has taken summer interns from the Saturday Academy. These interns are highly motivated high school students who spend the summer gaining real world experience in an engineering lab. The company worked with these interns over two summers to turn 186 black and white figures into colorful interactive illustrations.

“We wondered whether we could get an intern to write and illustrate a book over the summer,” said Phil Todd, Saltire Software’s CEO.  “This seemed too much, so we thought, how about getting a student to illustrate an existing (out of copyright) book.  Euclid's Elements is well out of copyright.  It has lots of mathematical diagrams and the mathematics, while sophisticated, is still at a level which a good high school student can grasp. We decided to do an interactive Euclid's Elements for the iPad.”

Saltire also teamed up with Dr. Michalis Sialaros, a professor from the University of London, a Royal Academy Research Fellowship recipient and mathematical historian. This began a collaboration between Saltire Software, Portland area high school students and London University professor to make Euclid’s mathematics accessible to a new generation.

Isabel Muench, a Jesuit High School student, had this to say after the completion of her internship at Saltire. “Working with the diagrams from Euclid’s Elements has helped me understand aspects of geometry that I didn’t understand before, despite having taken geometry in school… the experience has made me much more interested in computer science and mathematics than I was before.”

Saltire’s eBook, Euclid’s Elements, is available for $5.99 on the iBookstore. For more information, please visit http://saltire.com/apps/

For more information on Geometry Expressions and other Saltire Software products, visit http://saltire.com/

For more information on the Saturday Academy, please visit http://www.saturdayacademy.org/

About Saltire Software:

Based in downtown Tigard OR, Saltire Software was founded in 1989 as a spin off from Tektronix Laboratories.  Saltire has quietly built a strong reputation for innovative software in the mathematics education field, contributing software components to advanced calculators from all the major manufacturers.

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