Oughtred

Our mission

You have understanding that you want to transfer to someone else. This understanding is nonlinear; concepts build on foundations, build on each other, and interact. We are developing tools to make the structure of your understanding visible and explorable to the intended recipient. Historical innovations like footnotes, annotations, and hyperlinks are just the beginning. We will initially be targeting mathematics education, using research-based principles — and building custom components when required — to minimise extraneous cognitive load. We want to make the creation and consumption of educational content both as joyful and as efficient as possible, and to facilitate the best learning experiences until you can upload schemata directly from one brain to another.

What's in a name?

William Oughtred (1574 - 1660) was a mathematician, mathematics educator and, as the inventor of the slide rule, an edtech pioneer. In the preface of his "Clavis Mathematicae" (The Key to Mathematics), a textbook which Isaac Newton read as a young student at Cambridge, he writes:

Wherefore, that I might more clearly behold the things themselves, I uncasing the Propositions and Demonstrations out of their covert of words, designed them in notes and species appearing to the very eye.

Oughtred used symbols and abbreviations at a time when much was written in prose, and his insights into education and what now would perhaps be termed “UX” are still relevant today. It is this work that we build on, informed by his writings and empowered by the latest in technology and educational research.

Who we are

Alex Cutbill is currently a team of one.

After graduating from the University of Cambridge, where he studied mathematics, he moved to India to work in edtech. Creating educational resources in Adobe Flash there, he became convinced of the power of animation and interactivity. He learnt current web technologies and led a project to convert those Flash resources to HTML5, in the process recognising both the need for a new medium of communication incorporating animation and interactivity and the enormous potential web technologies have for creating it. His ideas have been refined and his convictions strengthened by the educational research he continues to read, as well as by his passion for the history of maths and his experiences working in edtech. Since moving back to the UK he has greatly enjoyed working in a couple of maths-edtech startups but felt the time was ripe to set up on his own and develop his ideas into a compelling product.