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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

this might be the most amazing book ever and I might even buy it and I know I'll get down votes because so many of you love books but....

part of me feels like , especially for a topic like this, I want webpages with interactive diagrams. Not last century's info dissemination tech but this century's info dissemination tech

I feel page like this

https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/

is far better online than any paper book on the same topic could ever be. that feels like it's probably true for almost all math, physics, and computer topics.

if I'm reading up on game ai i'd much rather have in page interactive examples than static text on a page.

this isn't in anyway meant as a comment on the book above itself. it's more a comment on tech/math/physics books in general

anyone else agree or am I alone in this way of thinking?

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There exists a book already for Linear Algebra w/interactive diagrams (that explodes my CPU) http://immersivemath.com/ila/index.html

I just want accompanying lectures that build intuition like these https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x... or even the author standing in front of a blackboard discussing each chapter in the book and posting the lectures on the book's page. Some author's have done this like https://cs.wheaton.edu/~tvandrun/dmfp/

If it must be 'immersive' I'd also rather have a self-contained interactive book I can keep locally with signed errata updates instead of having to rely on slow websites that may be abandoned by the author or shutdown for whatever copyright reasons or ninja edited by somebody with misinformation.

Edit: or a book with an online tutor, like the one MIT made for SICP http://icampustutor.csail.mit.edu/6.001-public/

'Wikipedia with intuitions' would beat out any single book trying to record them. My hope is that they one day expand their scope to not only cover knowledge but different ways of looking at it/understanding it.

Then for any given topic a given subject's 'lesson plan' could just follow a 'sequence' (a la LW) of excerpts reviewed for accuracy (in lieu of reading such excerpts out of a book) along with mediawiki/etc animations/images/videos that go along with those subjects.

I suppose it'd be a good idea to version those 'lesson plans' so later courses/syllabuses can benefit from newly-researched knowledge after it has been peer reviewed and added to a later 'version' of the curriculum (i.e. mitigating the 'quality control' issue of information shared online). And of course lecturing as it traditionally exists can still thrive albeit with a more freed focus for interactive learning (Q+A, practice problems in class, or whatever transpires to be the best tool to use in dedicated class time/lecture time)... It just seems like singleton books as knowledge containers are obsolete next to the potential of QAing existing 'open source' knowledge without the publisher/etc overhead.

> My hope is that they one day expand their scope [...]

The “they” who make Wikipedia are just volunteer contributors. Go make it happen!

I can't imagine pouring my time and energy into adding this type of content and having it be removed for $arbitary_but_qualifying_reason.

The "they" who decide the content classes which will be handled by the project (enforced as rules of the wiki) are nonprofit organizations I'll never be on the board of, so basically what cgriswald said.

Your original comment can be summarized as “I bet it would be great if a bunch of other people did a few tens of thousands of hours of volunteer work to make new tools for teaching math to me.”

Which as an idle speculative wish is fine as far as it goes, but has a vanishingly tiny chance of happening in whatever way you are envisioning. (Of course, various people around the world who are working on teaching math will continue to do their best, but without paying any attention to your specific desires.)

If instead you said “Wow, I have this great idea that would be worth a large team of people spending a few tens of thousands of hours on. Does anyone have an idea about what kind of prototyping, political organizing, or other work I can do to start on a project like that so I can make my dream a reality? Is there anyone I should talk to about this?” Etc. that would be a much more interesting basis for further discussion, and might actually lead somewhere.

The volunteers (and the tiny handful of paid staff) in charge of Wikipedia are certainly interested in new ideas for improving things. If you think it’s impossible that they’ll ever accept an improvement, and you aren’t interested in discussion, what’s the point in speculating about it?

Does anyone know of an online, public, shared mindmap type thing?

Funny you'd ask, I used to look into that a lot too. There wasn't one when I last checked, lemme know if you hear anything.

I'll second the recommendation on that video series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...

Highly, highly recommended for anyone who wants to actually understand linear algebra. If you're studying the material or need to use linear algebra in applications or are just curious watch those videos. It's not a huge time invest and it's a huge "force multiplier" to actually have an intuition for what's going on under the hood instead of seeing things as just collections of numbers and magical sequences of operations that "do stuff" for who knows what reason.

A proof-centric book I used that went well with the 3Blue1Brown series was Robert Valenza's LA book, which focuses on extending the applications of LA concepts to many settings which have no obvious geometric interpretations. It also has surprisingly easy proofs for exercises.

I was seriously confused why my Primer on Bezier Curves got hit for 500 visits in the course of an hour when it usually chugs along at a comfy 200~300 a day depending on which weekday it is... After finally going "fine, let's see if it's somewhere hidden in comments, let's hit up hn.algolia.com" turns out you're to blame... So thank you =)

I find that for a lot of Maths, having both a static textbook for "doing the rote exercises" and in paraller an interactive ebook or website is key for doing the thing you need to do to learn it, seeing the thing to feel it, and then ultimately step three being doing it yourself and seeing it work in order to understand it.

My page actually started that way - I wanted to understand Bezier curves because I was doing OpenType Font work from the ground up, and didn't know enough about Beziers, so I grabbed me some internet, learnt me some Bezier maths, and then in order to get the feeling and understanding working, I programmed the visuals so I could see what they did and in the process understand exactly why they did that.

Having pages like the Primer available is invaluable, but I'd posit that unless you also extend yourself to reading the "dry bits" and try to make it work yourself, it's really more eye candy than educational material. Nothing wrong with eye candy of course, and maybe it'll spark some recreational maths, but if you're serious about learning a subject, hit up all the resources and then try to teach it, even if just to yourself =)

Totally, one-hundred-thousand percent agreement from me.

Bret Victor liked to point out that we're completely ignoring the potential of the medium we're dealing with. We're using a dynamic medium made of magic ink to present static, non-interactive content. We're just delivering "information to be consumed" instead of creating "an environment to think in"[0].

If picture is worth a thousand words, then an interactive model is worth a thousand pictures. This is one good thing that could come out of proliferation of features in our browsers, as well as make tablets actually useful as a learning tool - that is, if more people bothered to use the medium to its full power. There are only few of those who try; some of their works can be found in [1], which is a lovely resource to sink your time in and see the yet untapped potential of digital technology.

[0] - http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/

[1] - http://explorableexplanations.com/

As hackermailman already pointed out, the book by Ström, Åström, and Akenine-Möller has some amazing LA visualizations: http://immersivemath.com/ila/index.html

Highly recommended!

`oncontextmenu="return false;"` on the body element. Sigh...

I love learning math from books, I feel like being forced to do the visualization in my own head can be helpful. I've seen a ton of beautiful math visualizations and I always enjoy them but on the whole, I think I've learned more from textbooks.

That said, the three blue one brown youtube course on Linear Algebra is truly amazing. I highly recommend it.

I agree completely.

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