Hacker News Reader

Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

As a fellow game dev this article should be targeted at readers like me. But my eyes can't help but *immediately* glaze over as soon as I read all the math notation.

I'm pretty ok at 3d video game math. I do lots of work with matrices, quaternions, vectors, and friends. It's not particularly difficult.

I can't for the life of me read mathy math. Wikipedia Math is inscrutable hieroglyphics. It's quite frustrating.

I wish someone would write a "foundations" article or book that spoke in language understandable by normal humans. Or at minimum had a bloody legend that explained what all the %&(#%& symbols meant.

View on HN

"It just means that there’s a lot of low-quality stuff under the same label, which has made that label questionable, and if you want to sift through it you have to be ready to filter for quality yourself... At some level GA is trying to “democratize” geometry." Hit me just now reading the case against GA linked in this thread, maybe the same way Munger remarks on Costco's counter-intuitive membership fee, the notation and systems of "real" math as we encounter them like you say in Wikipedia is the field's membership fee keeping out the riff-raff from overwhelming the gathering place and making the entire store burn down.

"But the point is to make the existing math more intuitive, not to discover new results. The fact that research mathematics is generally not concerned with making calculation and intuition easier to think about is, I think, a giant failure that it will eventually regret. There’s as much value in making things easy to use as there is in discovering them."

Modern vector notation (i, j ,k) came to be thanks to an electrical engineer bored of dealing with quaternions lol (Oliver Heaviside)

Honestly I'm surprised no one has done the programming/CS version of it where all the symbols and formula are explained with code. I'm rusty as hell on math but seems like it should be pretty reasonable to translate a lot of them to functions or similar per symbol.

Yes please.

This image makes the rounds semi-regularly: https://twitter.com/FreyaHolmer/status/1436696408506212353

Freya's content around math is always incredible, and yeah that's exactly what I meant.

It’s surprising to me that someone could know what a for loop is but not summation notation. Is summation notation not taught in school?

You have to learn about summation before you learn calculus, because any definition of integration requires series.

Imagine the idea being used for more complex math operations. Summation/Product notation is pretty straight forward (if you were ever taught it). The vast majority of math notation is not. Or rather most people are not taught most math notation. And even if you were taught it it's really hard to remember!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com