Goodbye Mr Titen

Once upon a time, in a land known as South Yorkshire, there was a maths teacher who was surfing around the t’Internet. This was back in the days when most web pages were still made from Sellotape, old records and sticky-backed plastic, which might explain why I was so amazed to find Mr Titen’s More Than Math page.

A webpage, made by a math(s) teacher, full of puzzles and homework hints. I was impressed. I wanted one. Now let’s be honest here, GeoCities web pages were all a bit eye-watering to look at and I have to say that Mr Titen’s was no exception. Frankly I wasn’t keen on the dancing teddy bears, but it still left me feeling inspired.

The result: Ms Lindemann’s Mathemagic Page was born. It looked not dissimilar to my current site, which was supposed to be an elegant lilac, reflecting the hastily polled opinions of some of my students. Sadly, a miscalculation with a rather ancient monitor resulted in a vista of pink, a colour scheme which remains to this day. (Yes, it is long overdue for an overhaul and redesign, but that’s another story entirely.) The earliest versions of my own site owed a lot to Mr Titen’s More Than Math Page; we may have had different ideas about how our sites should look, but I loved all his puzzles and optical illusions – ideas which still provide the basis for some of my own site’s most popular sections today.

My fledgling site lurked quietly inside my school’s website for a while (alas, its earliest incarnations have been lost, but perhaps that’s for the best). Of course, I really wanted to find my own little home on the web, but that caused me a bit of a problem: every permutation of mathemagic-dot-anything had already been snapped up. I agonised for ages, but I just couldn’t come up with anything else that wasn’t already taken, so I ended up adopting More Than Maths. It’s not plagiarism you know, it’s an homage – honestly!

I still popped back to visit Mr Titen from time to time, although his site has been very quiet for quite a few years now. So it feels a bit sad to know that this is it, GeoCities is no more. Mr Titen’s More Than Math Page has been consigned to history (and the Internet Archive).

Goodbye Mr Titen. Goodbye.