History
I, Igor Chudov, registered
domain algebra.com in the Fall of 1995. I was not
thinking about its commercial potential at the time at all, and was
attracted by the fact that algebra is spelled the same way in
Russian as well as in English. As an alternative, I considered
chudov.com (which I later registered, but decided in favor
of algebra.com because as a former student of Math High School 57 in
Moscow, I always liked math.
For a few years, aside from work, I have developed and supported a
free USENET moderation program STUMP, and
associated commercial hosting services. I realized that algebra.com
actually had potential after I noticed that it had several hundred
unexplained visitors per day, who turned out to be mostly students
looking for homework help. From then on, I tried to make algebra.com
to be practically helpful to someone just looking to do homework,
and also tried to make it teach the students aside from just giving
a solution to their math problems.
For a few years after that, algebra.com was a nice sleepy website
with a few solvers and a few lessons. In the spring of 2005, I decided
to change its nature to make it into a community based website where
real tutors can help real students. I created a system of free
tutoring (solving submitted problems). Also, tutors now can submit
lessons that have very high visibiilty. These lessons are much better
than anything that I could have ever written.
