Interactive Web Apps for Visualizations in Mathematics and Engineering

Depicting numbers in a graphical way has always been crucial to understand and explain the physical phenomena behind. Interactive graphical applications bring the understanding to a higher level, where the users get actively engaged. Moreover, interactive visualization of data, equations etc.… help to motivate students and strengthen the sharing of knowledge. At the Technical University of Munich, the Chair of Structural Mechanics and the Research Group Algebra developed interactive applications in the fields of mechanics and higher mathematics. Students can access the applications online at any time, without installation or special requirements, and, thus, can actively explore the content with a very low entry barrier. For example, they can experiment with a spring‐mass‐damper system and let it enter the resonance by changing the frequency of the excitation; or they can search for local maxima and minima of a function with side conditions with the Lagrange multipliers in an interactive and graphical way. The interactive process enhances the understanding, even if the user does not interact with a strategy but just uses his intuition. These applications can be also used to explain complex concepts to the general public. The source code is publicly available on https://github.com/ChairOfStructuralMechanicsTUM/Mechanics_Apps .     «

Depicting numbers in a graphical way has always been crucial to understand and explain the physical phenomena behind. Interactive graphical applications bring the understanding to a higher level, where the users get actively engaged. Moreover, interactive visualization of data, equations etc.… help to motivate students and strengthen the sharing of knowledge. At the Technical University of Munich, the Chair of Structural Mechanics and the Research Group Algebra developed interactive applications...     »