With all of the countless math resources out there, why on earth would someone bother making another? Students all have their textbooks, and usually some kind of access to either teachers, tutors, professors, TAs, or some other kind of knowledgable person. Khan Academy is a household name, YouTube has no shortage of videos explaining all kinds of topics, and Google turns up plenty of content for many a topic. Anyone willing to pay even a few dollars a month can access the step-by-step functionality on WolframAlpha. So again, why bother making yet another math website?

The first reason is price. I remember being a student, and the idea of spending money didn't even cross my mind. It was free or nothing. So while anyone can charge for help, my goal is to send the direct cost to the student to exactly zero. The more content that can be made permanently and freely available, the better.

The second reason is the lack of step-by-step solutions to almost every problem. Textbooks are notorious for solving the easiest problems during the explanations, only to provide harder problems in the problem sets. Even if students are lucky enough to get solutions in the back of the book, they still don't get any explanations. Knowing you have a wrong answer provides little insight into how to actually get the correct one, especially for more involved problems. The slogan of this website is dedicated in honor of the single most hated phrase in all of mathematics: left as an exercise to the reader.

The third reason is the lack of material for sufficiently advanced topics. There's plenty of information about calculus out there, but after that the quality and depth of the material takes a nosedive. While linear algebra and differential equations have some content available, they are far more limited in scope than calculus (not to mention the topics below it). And once you get to proof-oriented math, you'll be stuck scouring 360p YouTube lecture videos posted during Obama's first term. 

The fourth reason is format. There is no reason all of the information contained in a full-fledged textbook cannot be posted online. Websites can be easily searched and referenced, while books require flipping back and forth. It is a rare lecture that has time stamps marking different topics in time. But perhaps the biggest benefit is that a website can be updated constantly with both new content and fixes for errors. The same cannot be said of textbooks, the best of which are still printed in ever-updated editions.

It is my hope that in time, Mathmatique will grow from its humble beginnings of not-even-half-of-calculus displayed in janky programmer CSS to a useful resource for anyone who really wants to see all the steps.