David Eppstein's Wikipedia Gallery Contributions | Hacker News Reader

David Eppstein's Wikipedia Gallery Contributions

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133 pointsvinchuco22 comments

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LucasVB is another great contributor with some fantastic animations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LucasVB/Gallery

Two personal favorites are:

Line integral of a scalar field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Line_integral_of_scalar_f...

and Fourier Transform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fourier_transform_time_an...

What software are these folks using to produce these images/animations?

From his tumblr: http://1ucasvb.tumblr.com/faq:

The 3D stuff (with shadows and such) was created using the excellent, free raytracer POV-Ray.

The rest were created using a custom-made PHP library that uses GD for graphics. The library adds a whole lot of functionality that isn’t present in GD or PHP: drawing anything with alpha blending, geometry and math primitives, 2D and 3D rotations (including quaternions), better anti-aliasing, object-oriented interface, etc.

I find it disappointing that even in the litany of alternate technologies tried, there's no reference to using Web technologies, so these animations could be interactive. Obviously the author's choice, but some could benefit now and going forward.

David appears to use CaRMetal

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CaRMetal CaRMetal - Wikipedia

BTW, even if that's not the case, I've found CaRMetal exceptionally useful for drawing similar constructions.

Going to shamelessly plug my interactive viewer for n-dimensional geometry, demoed here with a tesseract. http://transdimensional.xyz/ Each column is a slider that previews rotation of each axis. Drag them. Made with threejs/webgl

I took courses with Eppstein at UCI. I was always impressed with his ability to construct clear example diagrams to explain any question.

Glad to see some of these great diagrams were shared with a wider audience :)

I wanted to take 161 with him at UCI. I heard he was great. Unfortunately I had to take it with Hirschberg (who has his picture on the Wikipedia page).. I still get PTSD from those all or nothing multi-part algorithm problems.

He's a legend, I remember in our Graph Algorithm's class our "text book" was mostly composed of the articles that he had written. Glad to see UCI representing here.

The UCI campus ACM club is quite distinguished as well ;)

I took the advanced data structures course. That guy is chill.

He's brilliant. After learning he contributed to a massive amount of CS and Math articles on Wikipedia, Wikipedia has become my goto for those types of articles. Before that, I did not know wether or not to trust academic articles on Wikipedia.

No disrespect to those who do original research, however it seems that these images, made freely available to hundreds and thousands of people seeking to educate themselves, contribute more to the advancement of human knowledge than all but the most important published theorems.

I’m not sure there’s a point to rank either, but it is certainly true that research and education are both complementary and monumentally important for the advancement of knowledge.

I guess my point is just that the utility of this kind of work seems undervalued in comparison to people proving endless minor theorems in little-read papers, which gets romanticized as 'finding out stuff no-one has ever known before'

If not for the research, though, there'd be nothing that needed explaining through illustration.

You might like distill: https://distill.pub/about/

I've commented this before but it's worth mentioning these fantastic interactive SVGs again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cmglee https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Burj_Kha...

David Eppstein is a mainstay of WikiProject Computer Science[0]; I encourage anyone interested in contributing to Wikipedia in that area to refer to the group for help & support!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computer...

I hadn't reflected on it before, but it seems an unintended consequence of power users like this is that it has created a de facto wikipedia math illustration "style". Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing

almost as talented as seedfeeder:

NSFW!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seedfeeder

Beautiful! Thanks for posting.

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