Future scientific digital documents with MathML, XML, and SVG

The Oregon State University Physics Department has recently initiated an undergraduate degree program in computational physics. associated with that program is a National Science Foundation-funded project to develop curricula materials for introductory and advanced computational science classes. While we plan to publish traditional paper texts for these courses, we also are exploring ways to publish digital versions of these materials containing features that exploit new technologies. Specifically, we wish to advance digital books using multimodal and interactive elements to increase the access and understanding of mathematics and science. This installment of the education department describes the motivation behind, and the technologies needed for, the features we envision in future scientific documents.