“Newton’s Gravity” conveys the power of simple mathematics to tell the fundamental truth about nature. Many people, for example, know the tides are caused by the pull of the Moon and to a lesser extent the Sun. But very few can explain exactly how and why that happens. Fewer still can calculate the  actual pulls of the...

In January 1999, I was preparing to teach an introductory programming class in Java. I had taught it three times and I was getting frustrated. The failure rate in the class was too high, and, even for students who succeeded, the overall level of achievement was too low.

One of the problems I saw was the books. I had tried...

The decade of the 80's saw the dramatic expansion of high performance computer graphics into domains previously able only to irt with the technology. Among the most dramatic has been the incorporation of real-time interactive manipulation and display for human gures. Though actively pur- sued by several research groups, the...

Relationships matter. Ever since the dawn of time, when caveman Fred asked caveman Barney whether there was any work down at the quarry, human beings have always networked. We’re social creatures who like to reach out and talk to someone. As the Internet developed and grew in popularity, people rapidly took advantage of this new...