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Comment by aroberge | Hacker News Reader

The title got me excited ... but it is misleading. The math book of the future will be available under a Creative Commons licence and will be set up so as to be easily translatable into other languages. This is just setting up a future money grab ... which, I understand, may fall squarely within the philosophy of HN and startups. One more resource I will unfortunately not be able to use and incorporate in my teaching (which is done in French).

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I too received a different image from the words. Something that captures the equivalent vision for math learners that light table holds for programmers. Not necessarily an emphasis on visual - sometimes that is right but not always.

Key being the ability to fiddle in real time to gain an intuition, as the brain is optimized to do. Computers give the closest tool for estimating the abstract to something tangible.

Is there a good list of CC textbooks? So far the only organized move like that is Wikibooks.

It's kind of sad that the Gates foundation will probably never support a movement like that.

Khan Academy releases open source teaching material and is funded by Gates foundation. Probably some day they may support textbooks too... Any reason why not?

I was just under the impression that Gates wouldn't support open source/cc stuff. The Feynman Silverlight thing made me pretty cynical.

Yea, I was quoting them - though maybe "format" or "philosophy" might be a good modifier to add.

I don't know. Based on economies of scale, the future might be English and Chinese and leave everything as "third world languages". It would be nicer to have content be free but sophisticated tools be paid, though.

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