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## A free college textbook.

Versatile Mathematics is a textbook designed for an introductory survey of mathematical applications. It is completely free and open for use and modification under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license.

Presentation shown at 2016 AMATYC Conference

This book is aimed at a freshman- or sophomore-level college class intended for students who are not math or engineering students, but rather taking an introductory survey course to fulfill a mathematics requirement. We wrote it specifically for such a course at the community college level, which students enter after fulfilling basic algebra requirements. Aside from that, there is really very little prerequisite knowledge required to be able to follow the text.

There are currently seven chapters:

1. Financial Mathematics
2. Growth Models
3. Statistics
4. Probability
5. Linear Programming
6. Logic
7. Set Theory
It is still a work in progress, and we will continue to add new chapters.

## Features

### Example Videos

Every example in the text has an accompanying video that can be accessed by clicking on the Example box in the margin.

### Try It Now

Clicking on the words "Try It" in the margin will lead to an interactive web page where students can try a problem similar to the example in the text and receive immediate feedback on their work.

### Free Online Homework

MyOpenMath provides free, algorithmically-generated homework for every problem in the text.

There is a growing community of like-minded educators who have decided to reduce the burden of textbook costs on our students by creating and freely sharing high-quality materials. Several members of the mathematics department at Frederick Community College in Frederick, Maryland joined this community, building on the work of others by remixing and adding to what they wrote, and the result is this textbook.

We believe that knowledge does not belong to any one of us, so our job is to share it rather than hoarding it. We wrote this book to accomplish that purpose.

The project was headed by Josiah Hartley, who also wrote the exercises on MyOpenMath. Chapter authors include

• Josiah Hartley
• Erum Marfani
• Val Lochman
• Evan Evans
• Dina Yagodich
and the rest of the math department at FCC provided help in reviewing and editing the text. Special thanks to Greg Coldren and Pei Taverner, in addition to those listed above, who also helped review chapters other than their own.

Larry Huff created the Storyline modules that correspond to the "Try It" exercises, for which we are indebted to him.

## Thanks

We used Math in Society, another open textbook written for a similar course, as our starting point. Many of the examples, exercises, and explanations were copied from that book, and we owe the author, David Lippman, a tremendous debt of gratitude for showing us that a project like this could be done, and giving us so much to work with. He also has done a fantastic job of designing MyOpenMath, which we use for free online homework.

We also used material from the OpenStax College Introductory Statistics textbook, an open peer-reviewed text.

We'd also like to thank the math department at FCC for their unflagging support, especially our department chair, Gary Hull, who not only provided us with backing and encouragement, but also gave us a booklet that he had spent many hours writing for the same course.

The administration at FCC also provided support in the form of a summer grant to write the first six chapters, so we'd like to thank them as well.

## Contact

Please use the form below to contact the authors if you would like more information, to help with the project, or just to send us kudos! If you would like to report errors in the text, use the other form.

Note: Fields marked with an * are required.

## Report Errata

Please use the form below to report any errors (typos, miscalculations, etc.) that you find in the book. This will help us continue to improve the text.

Note: Fields marked with an * are required.