
A Coloring Book about Group Theory - alexberke
http://www.coloring-book.co
======
hpcjoe
Showed this to my wife (a math/physics high school teacher). She loved it! Not
sure if she will use this in her STEAM club, but it is possible. Thanks for
the link!

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kafkaesq
Ha! As it they would allow kids these days to even so much as look at a book
that's not specifically designed to help them pass their standardized tests.

~~~
hpcjoe
Happily not all teachers teach to the tests. STEAM (Science Technology
Engineering Art Math) is all about trying to stoke interest in these paths.
She's holding her first event today.

FWIW: I've seen districts where parents don't care, and she's student taught
in some of these. It is terrible, as the kids aren't there to learn, the
teachers are stressed out and unhappy, and the parents don't give a damn. The
place where she is now is a college prep school. Hard core academic criteria
to graduate, not just passing tests. Strong incentives from parents to kids to
work hard, though not all do.

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enraged_camel
Not sure why it got flag-killed. I vouched it.

(The flagging system is in serious need of review or overhaul. At the very
least, users should be required to provide a reason, which is then made
publicly visible as anonymous comments.)

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sillysaurus3
Nah, it's working fine. You vouched it. That's democracy, and one of my all-
time favorite features of the site.

Mods also override flags and rollback the submission time on certain stories,
particularly when they're substantive or offer new information.

FWIW, I couldn't figure out how to use this site. I tried scrolling down and
clicking around and nothing was happening. Eventually I spotted the "next
page" link at the very bottom, but I imagine some of the flags came due to
similar reasons.

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enraged_camel
No, the problem is that if I had not vouched it when I did, it would probably
have fallen off the front page and never seen by most of the readers. Timing
makes a huge difference and that's why the feature is broken and regularly
abused.

In any case, page usability has never been a valid reason for flagging a site.
Flags are usually reserved for sites that are grossly off-topic, sleazy, etc.
Which again makes me wish flag reasons were a thing.

~~~
reitanqild
Agree. I've decided to go mostly readonly and this is one of the reasons.

I now read HN mostly through either @hnrobot at Telegram or
[http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/)

Both those will let me see everything I find interesting that has been posted
while nit having to worry about checking twice an hour to catch interesting
stories before they are flagged to death.

~~~
sillysaurus3
hckrnews is good. I like the linear nature. But look at the actual articles
that are currently dead.

Their silly CSS makes it impossible to copy-paste and filter by [dead], but
suffice to say the headlines aren't flattering. The system seems to be working
quite well.

The idea that a massive amount of quality is slipping through the cracks due
to flagging is suspect at best. Anyone who spends significant time on /new
will know just how much cruft is caught by flags. You just don't see how well
it's working because wading through /new is tedious (to put it very mildly).

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kazinator
Not about group theory _per se_ , but a nice illustration of some
translations, rotations and reflections applied to 2D shapes, which have
group-theoretic descriptions (that we can learn about in some other book).

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alexberke
(I'm the author) I've really been struggling with how to frame it! It has
group theory concepts but is really about symmetry and other parts of math.
I'm looking for ideas of how to talk about it and frame it -- please share
your thoughts!

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Raphmedia
The small animation when changing page makes me dizzy and almost sick. Might
want to remove that and allow regular scroll. The "pages" are not even full
height, you still need to scroll anyway.

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alexberke
(author here) Thanks for the feedback. The idea was to mimic flipping through
the pages of a book.

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theoh
Not free, but related + possibly complementary:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11745486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11745486)

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killjoywashere
This is awesome, but can't I just buy the thing?

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alexberke
It's still a work in progress so it's not yet published, but it will be by the
end of the year! Thanks for asking! Until then you can print the PDF for free
or play online: [http://coloring-book.co/book.pdf](http://coloring-
book.co/book.pdf)

~~~
akud
Are you the author? This is a great idea - I've been thinking about doing this
with graph theory.

Here's an example:

[https://plus.google.com/+AlexKudlick/posts/MWNRWTRATgA](https://plus.google.com/+AlexKudlick/posts/MWNRWTRATgA)

I've been building tools lately; for now, a graph editor.

Hit me up if you're interested in talking about tools for creating this sort
of content, I'd be interested to know more about your approach.

My email is in my profile.

~~~
bg4
My kids enjoyed this: [http://jdh.hamkins.org/math-for-eight-year-
olds/](http://jdh.hamkins.org/math-for-eight-year-olds/)

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jonmarkgo
This is awesome. I've never really understood group theory before, but this
helps a lot

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riffraff
wait, is the thing in the shapes & symmetry page a dragonfly? Don't
dragonflies have a thinner body and longer more separated wings?
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Me...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Mesurupetala%2C_dragonfly%2C_Late_Late_Jurassic%2C_Tithonian_Age%2C_Solnhofen_Lithographic_Limestone%2C_Solnhofen%2C_Bavaria%2C_Germany_-
_Houston_Museum_of_Natural_Science_-_DSC01817.JPG/440px-thumbnail.jpg)

~~~
alexberke
I wish I had had an earlier consultation from an insect specialist. Thank you
for catching that!

~~~
amsheehan
You never asked!

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vardhanw
Any prerequisites? Age or education? Can this be given to high school kids?

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jacobolus
Try reading it. Definitely accessible to HS kids if not younger.

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catnaroek
And they won't learn any group theory from it.

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jacobolus
Why do you think that?

The basic ideas of group theory are definitely accessible to grade schoolers,
and even the fancier parts of an undergraduate group theory course (Sylow
theorems, etc.) are accessible to high school students who go through the
work.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Nathan Carter’s lovely book _Visual Group
Theory_ to any bright 15 year old. But for a (say) 10-year-old, just learning
about the symmetries of shapes and tilings is plenty of useful and interesting
math.

~~~
catnaroek
The Sylow theorems are by no means “fancy”. If you don't understand them, then
you don't know group theory, plain and simple.

Now, we can debate the merits of exposing children to groups before they can
understand group theory. But learning group _theory_ means learning (0) the
axiomatic definitions of group, subgroup, coset, etc. (1) the main theorems in
group theory and their proofs.

~~~
alexberke
some of those things are on the book's Theory Reference page, which is linked
to be some of the underlined concepts in the book: [http://www.coloring-
book.co/#!/theory-reference](http://www.coloring-book.co/#!/theory-reference)

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celticninja
Why do sites still hijack the back button?

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Raphmedia
They also hijack the scroll for a hard to see "next page" button.

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DrScump
Warning: on Chrome, anyway, this is a clicktrap from which you cannot back-
navigate out.

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alexott
Same in firefox

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jakubp
Also coloring doesn't work, and uBlock Origin kills the app.

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catnaroek
A “book on group theory” with no reference to the Sylow theorems, Lagrange's
theorem or Cayley's theorem?

Maybe this should be called “a book that illustrates gadgets that happen to
have group structure”.

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yasserkaddour
According to the author the book is still work in progress, it would be more
productive to raise an issue or make a PR on github.

[https://github.com/aberke/coloring-book](https://github.com/aberke/coloring-
book)

~~~
gus_massa
The problem is that the author of the book and the previous comment are
talking about different books with a different scope, because each one has a
different idea of what "group theory" means, it depends a lot of your
background.

This book is about symmetry and group definitions, but it has no or very
little details about generic properties of groups.

The previous comment is about a book that no one has written, that is a
coloring book for students of a math major in the university, probably in the
2nd or 3rd year. In this (unwritten) book the idea is to study the general
theorems about groups, and in each case give some visual examples to color and
apply the theorem.

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catnaroek
Only one of those is group _theory_.

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gus_massa
As a mathematician, I agree. But when you talk with people that work in the
applications, they usually have weird definitions.

In particular, in this book they don't use $Z_2$ that is the usual notation in
math (at least here). They use $C_2$ that is more usual in physics. And for
the selection of the groups I guess the author has some interest in
crystallography.

~~~
alexberke
Yes the motivation was crystallography and giving a small amount of group
theory background was about providing the groundwork for talking about it.

