Penrose: From mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams | Hacker News Reader

Penrose: From mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams

penrose.ink

247 pointsrg11121 comments

Plug for Grant Sanderson’s (3Blue1Brown) Manim and now Manim Community edition.

Wow so you give it mathematical statements and it gives you a diagram? Is this what they call as “declarative” programming? I really like how it looks, and I can feel the passion behind the project. Very encouraging to see.

That's a really nice application of declarative programming indeed.

This looks slick, reminds me a lot of Basalt[1][2].

1: (2019 thread) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21774018

2: (2021 thread) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29347715

Not sure re-using an already established term, Penrose diagram[0], for something else entirely is a good idea if you want people to find your project through their search engine.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_diagram

A love the concept behind this project: a system that generates diagrams to represent arbitrary abstract mathematical ideas. At its core seems to be state of the art algorithms for finding nice specific layouts out of the more general constraints of the abstract relationships to be represented.

That isn't a Venn diagram. It's an Euler diagram

We usually name things after the first person that wasn't Euler that discovered the thing.

They're different things though

As Wikipedia has on the page on Euler diagrams: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Euler_and_Venn_diagr...

From 2020, and still not open...

https://github.com/penrose/penrose ?

Ah, my bad, I think it should be higher and the google form should likely be removed. It's also not visible enough in https://penrose.ink/. I guess I've been conditioned by many website, where if I see a email field I think I have to signup to try...

The website does say it's still to be released or something to that effect.

Great!

Does anyone else think it's weird to name stuff like this after someone who isn't dead yet?

Agree. I assumed Penrose was backing this...

Wonder if he'll have something to say at some point...

Honestly, I don't like it even after people that are dead. (Apache Kafka, for example.)

Unfortunate naming. There’s already a notation for tensors called Penrose graphical notation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation

As well as Penrose diagrams, which are something entirely different.

There's even a Penrose tiling, Penrose triangle and Penrose stairs.

So yeah, not ideal for a graphics framework.

Err, that's the whole reason it is named this way. People will anyway need to specify what kind of penrose thing they want (stairs, triangle, tiling, graphics framework, ...)

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