Experimentarium Digitale is not just a web site displaying interactive numerical experiments of mathematical models in physics, population biology, probability, etc.  It also advocates the prominent role that interactive numerical experiments can play to develop one’s own intuition and explore models for the purpose of scientific culture, teaching or scientific research. Interactivity and vizualisation are the keywords. The philosophy is: change the data (e. g., parameters, initial conditions,…) and see at once the resulting effects and do it again.

This approach is concretely illustrated by interactive numerical experiments that are not only available online but that have also been used in various academic courses (both by the teachers and the learners) and in a MOOC. These interactive numerical experiments can also be embedded in ebooks, as we exemplify it with an ebook collection also named Experimentarium Digitale that was started recently.

A word on the history of Experimentarium Digitale. Marc Monticelli started to develop in 1995 a software named xDim at the Nonlinear institute of Nice-Sophia Antipolis (France). The purpose was to develop a toolbox to create interactive numerical experiments for scientific research but also for teaching. This software was used by many researchers and PhD students mainly in the realm of dynamical systems. Based on this know-how, Experimentarium Digitale was created in 2013, as a kind of emanation of the xDim project. A driving force was to develop the use of interactive numerical experiments inside ebooks that are readable on tablets and smartphones.

Technical note. The numerical experiments are written in JavaScript, not to be confused with Java. JavaScript resides inside HTML documents and provide interactivity to web pages that are not achievable with simple HTML. It is a scripting language that is run in your browser.