Purplemath began in 1998 as a personal web site created by Elizabeth Stapel. Ms. Stapel’s initial site included course-specific materials for her math students in various classes at various schools. Later, she started adding a few lessons, so students who missed a class would be able to catch up on whatever “this always confuses everybody the first time” topic had arisen. As she created more lessons, traffic at her personal site increased.
Eventually, she decided to do a complete site redesign to create a more professional appearance and to highlight the list of lessons. In order to pick a color theme, she asked her son, then about two and a half years old, which color he liked best. Naturally, he picked purple.
Traffic continued to increase, and in 1999 the site had to be moved from its free hosting to its own domain name, “purplemath”. A few years after, “purplemaths” (with an “s” at the end) was added for the benefit of British-English speakers; “purplemath.org” followed later.
