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Title

Web Applications using Mathematica for Math Education
Author

Hidekazu Takahashi
Organization: Kawase High School
Department: Mathematics
Conference

2002 Applications of Computer Algebra Conference (ACA '2002)
Conference location

Volos, Greece
Description

J/Link technology was announced on February 2000 by Wolfram Research. It is a part of MathLink technology which integrates Mathematica and Java. It allows you to call Java classes and methods from Mathematica. It also lets you use and control the Mathematica kernel for calculation from a Java program. As an example, we can imagine a web application like "The Integrator" on the Wolfram Research's web site. This is a program which calculates a client's integration request using Mathematica kernel on the server and returns the result back to the client. J/Link enables us to create this kind of web applications quite easily. There are two advantages of this kind of applications. The users can access Mathematica functions via the Internet or local area network even if Mathematica is not installed on their local machine. They can easily see the results calculated by Mathematica on their web browser even if they don't know how to use Mathematica. These advantages have a profound effect on math education. In Japanese schools, a lot of computers for students don't have Mathematica installed on them yet, and almost all students who learn mathematics don't know how to use Mathematica. So web applications will surely help them learn mathematics more easily.

In this article, I will introduce some web applications using Mathematica which I have developed for math education. They all are based on my packages which handle 3D and 2D graphics. Especially it is difficult for students to clearly visualize or imagine 3D figures, so I believe my applications are an effective way to draw them and to rotate them by dragging with a mouse. The combination of Mathematica's powerful graphics functions and LiveGraphics3D applet by Mr. Martin Kraus actualizes them.
Subjects

*Wolfram Technology > Linking Technology > J/Link
*Wolfram Technology > Linking Technology > MathLink
*Wolfram Technology > Special Versions > webMathematica
Keywords

Java, The Integrator, math education, 2D and 3D graphics