World of Mathematics
world.mathigon.org
world.mathigon.org
This is the key point, I think. Most of my non-technical friends have only vague ideas or know nothing about these topics. Actually working with differential equations might be hard, but most people should at least have an understanding of their use cases and why they are important or beautiful. And this way of presenting math is of course much more compelling than any high school math book I ever saw.
I think basic economics is just as important to understanding these topics than mathematics. I hear very naive statement about economics from people who know enough mathematics to easily understand the economics, if they had studied it.
Do not get me wrong, that is great that technology, programming, science is so easy to study now.
What I wish is similar quality resources being available in other topics, I am bad with: economy, laws, business, psychology...
I am placing my bets on these topics being in high demand. Yet it takes a geek interested in technology to be also interested in unrelated subjects.
E: grammar.
I agree it is very important to understand something about (beyond introductory) various approaches to economics if you want to understand how key people involved were thinking about these problems. Here the use of the methods are more important that their accuracy or precision.
For that matter, understanding politics (something neither maths or economic thinking does well) is probably much more important to your stated examples.
> Most of my non-technical friends have only vague ideas or know nothing about these topics
That would include Mozart and Shakespeare equally as much as mathematics. Heck, even I have fairly vague ideas about all three.
Edit: I played with it for a bit, and wow. This is so cool. All the cool technology they use meshes seamlessly with content. Added this to my special bookmarks folder along with Statistics Done Wrong and Experimental Design (Norvig).
Make the landing page quick and static and loads the minimum. After you have the visitors attention with the information on that page THEN the next page can take longer (Give them a warning)
The bounce rate on this site must be incredible.
But if I may put in a final plea to these and all other web developers: I beg you, stop breaking the browser's "Back" button. I know you included your own lovely, visible back button in your page content, but I'm used to using the one in my browser and I make heavy use of keyboard or gesture shortcuts for it. You shouldn't have to break that to design a beautiful site!
Gets good PageSpeed and YSlow results however.
For the areas of math that I know well, the content is exactly what I would expect -- i.e. it's exactly what I would say to my non-math friends if they asked me what I was doing in, for example, my graph theory class.
For some aspects, pity the energy invested. I'd still love to see a normal HTML site and then we can discuss the content, not just the shininess.
I'm no mathematician, but my gut tells me that advancing mathematics is not the clinical, uninspired, technical process that the "mathematician" stereotype implies. Instead, it seems to be fueled as much by creativity, imagination and mental flexibility as any purely artistic endeavor. Like art, it also requires significant discipline to master its technical underpinnings, is a gamble that pays off in years (if ever), and produces works that have the power to completely alter human understanding.
So it's a bummer it has not developed a rebellious and disruptive image, the way pop art careers have. As a result, the field is not benefited by creative, motivated youth with ambitions of changing the world. One can only hope improvements in math education (more conceptual techniques, higher teacher pay, less corporate influence, etc) can make it more accessible and catalyze an eventual change in its perception.
Looks beautiful, wish it would load well.
I did not experience the slow loading times others did. Maybe the slowness was from the site experiencing a HN hit.
Feedback: when I click the Facebook like button, it tries to fit a text box in the area assigned to the button, and simply does not fit.
> But in the 1970s, the English mathematician Sir Roger Penrose (1931) made an amazing discover.*
Should be "discovery", unless it's some weird semi-nounization like "ask" or "spend".
Has anyone tried similar approach?
One of my favorite parts of math is puzzling over problems and coming up with solutions myself (even if the solution has been known for thousands of years prior.) I wish this book would set up problems I could puzzle over, rather than just give me the solutions before I knew there was a problem!
The colors in this are absolutely fantastic. It's an incredibly well polished product save the lack of content. I can't wait to see this evolve.
However, I did read about a hoax in the 90's where there was a claim of a fractal compression technique that could reduce a file down to 1% of its original size, which turned out to just be a program that stored a reference to the file's location instead of an actual compressed file.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=885055
that wikipedia page was mostly written by one of the people behind the hoax.