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New York Times story of Neil Heffernan's creation of a computerized tutor designed to emulate actual teachers, eventually becoming ASSISTments

from the abstract: "Mathematics is now at a remarkable in exion point, with new technology radically extending the power and limits of individuals. Crowd- sourcing pulls together diverse experts to solve problems; symbolic computation tackles huge routine calculations; and computers check proofs too long and complicated for humans to comprehend. The Study of Mathematical Practice is an emerging interdisciplinary eld which draws on philoso- phy and social science to understand how mathematics is produced. Online mathematical activity provides a novel and rich source of data for empirical investigation of mathematical practice - for example the community question-answering system mathover ow contains around 40,000 mathe- matical conversations, and polymath collaborations provide transcripts of the process of discovering proofs. Our preliminary investigations have demonstrated the importance of \soft" aspects such as analogy and creativity, alongside deduction and proof, in the production of mathematics, and have given us new ways to think about the roles of people and machines in creating new mathematical knowledge. We discuss further investigation of these resources and what it might reveal. Crowdsourced mathematical activity is an example of a \social machine", a new paradigm, identi- ed by Berners-Lee, for viewing a combination of people and computers as a single problem-solving entity, and the subject of major international research endeavours. We outline a future research agenda for mathematics social machines, a combination of people, computers, and mathematical archives to create and apply mathematics, with the potential to change the way people do mathe- matics, and to transform the reach, pace, and impact of mathematics research."