Gilbert and Hatcher applets
The Book
In 1999 Wiley published a new mathematics for liberal arts students textbook, Mathematics Beyond the Numbers, by George T. Gilbert and Rhonda L. Hatcher. I had loved teaching the Univeristy of Nebraska's liberal arts math course, Math 203, and was already working with Wiley to publish the Wiley WebTests products, and so I proposed developing a suite of Java applets to accompany the textbook.
These applets were divided into two types: "demonstrations" and "calculators". The demonstrations illustrated concepts from the book, and were itended for use in classroom demonstration or individual study. The calculators could be used either to accompany lectures or to assist with homework.
Java Swing was not widely available when I started the project, and so I also developed a library of GUI widgets to provide a consistent modern (by 1990s standards!) UX to the project and extend the limited capabilities of the Java AWT. However because Swing, and then Flash, came to dominate web UI software very shortly after this project was completed, I never made further use of this UI toolkit.
The Applets
With deprecation of Java applets in 2017, the applets can no longer be easily viewed. The following pages reproduce screenshots of the applets, together with the instruction text to illustrate how they were used. (Click on an applet link for the instruictions and then on "Start" to see the screenshots.)
Voting Methods
Apportionment
Mathematics of Money
Probability
- Demonstration of Long-Run Empirical Probability
- Factorials, Permutations and Combinations Calculator
Statistics
Paths and Networks
Number Theory
- Check Digit Calculator
- Letter Frequency Analysis Calculator
- Affine Cipher Calculator
- RSA and Hill Cipher Calculator