What is Holistic Numerical Methods Institute (HNMI)?
In 1985, while pursuing his doctorate in Clemson University, Autar Kaw revised a WPAFB Apple IIe based BASIC program for laminate analysis of composite materials. Since migration to PCs was not an easy task then (1988), he and a few hardworking independent study students wrote a completely new laminate analysis program called PROMAL. This tool was then used in teaching graduate level and senior elective course in Advanced Composite Materials course. Since 1988, PROMAL, which is now written in Visual Basic for Windows, has evolved into a product that is used in over 40 universities worldwide, and accompanies the Mechanics of Composite Materials textbook (1997, 2005). Naturally, the success of this idea of developing computational tools was extended in 1990 to a course in Numerical Methods. At that time, we started developing simulations for Numerical Methods using Microsoft Quickbasic3.0, and then in Visual Basic for Windows. In the past two decades with advances in mathematical package
