
Mathigon.org: "The Math Book of the Future" - nickpinkston
http://www.mathigon.org/
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aroberge
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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batgaijin
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.

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SudarshanP
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?

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

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ChristianMarks
The site is visually compelling--I have been unable to locate much
mathematics, however. There are a few exceptions within the World of
Mathematics. The top three entries under Symmetry and Space and the panel on
sequences under Numbers and Patterns contain some content. Nevertheless, the
little content available and the classroom activities PDFs display a
transcendent level of professionalism, a superior technical mastery of
apparently every aspect of digital publication and an infallible mathematical
aesthetic sensibility. The placeholders look promising.

What would be most useful to me is know-how: I would like to know how to
produce impressive graphics and video presentations at this level.

Oops: typo in the sequences panel.

" _Nowbody_ knows whether 3003 appears more than eight times, or whether there
are any other numbers appearing eight or more times. This is known as
Singmaster’s conjecture, named after the American mathematician David
Singmaster (1939)."

Rewrite the last sentence, given the audience. State the corect conjecture in
full--don't say 'this', especially when the preceding sentence is a
disjunction, no disjunct of which is a conjecture. The conjecture isn't
_whether_ 3003 appears eight or more times. If this is intended as "3003
occurs eight or more times" then it is not Signmaster's conjecture. The reader
would not know that the conjecture is the existence of a uniform bound on all
the occurrences of numbers in Pascal's triangle other than 1. The statement as
it stands contains misleading extraneous cognitive load and must be corrected
--there is too much to learn. Give the reader good examples to build upon. The
reader can supply his or her own conceptual ambiguities while attempting to
manage the cognitive load of the subject.

The success of the site will largely depend on how well it manages extraneous,
intrinsic and germane cognitive load.

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ChristianMarks
I made two typos of my own: 'corect' should be 'correct' and 'Signmaster'
(obviously an improvement on the original) should be 'Singmaster'. In general
it is difficult to write even one page of correct mathematics, and this is a
preview. I don't know how well soliciting content will work, given the
copyright.

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akg
Awesome! It would be really cool to see an overhaul of current research papers
to be more suited in digital form. A static PDF with words just doesn't do
justice when you can enrich research and content with animations and
interactivity. Heres an excellent example:
[http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt...](http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt/)

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jahewson
While the graphic format you link to might be ok for novices who are reading a
seminal paper on graph theory but supposedly need an illustration to explain
"linear" and "all pairs" (really?). As someone familiar with the jargon I find
it increadibly frustrating. I image it would take 10x longer at least to
create such a document than writing the prose - not a great use of
researcher's time.

In particular the lack of a solid left margin makes it hard to read. Really
it's not a paper anymore, it's an infographic.

It seems considerably more wise to educate novices in the jargon, than to re-
write every research paper in a novice-friendly over-illustrated manner. After
all, how many graphs of "linear" do our novices really need to look at?

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Evbn
Hyper linking content (with a clean visual pesentation for links and
displaying linked content)is the answer to the question of how much
introductory/background content to put into a document. Cf wiki, especially
the kind that auto-link known terms.

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nickpinkston
Really excited to see this - some higher math here and what looks like the
seed of some good concepts.

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FrojoS
Would you mind to link to any of it. After only seeing 'coming soon' windows,
without any content, for a a dozen tries I gave up.

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edtechdev
Very nice visually, but it doesn't look like it's accessible (#a11y).

And, this makes accessibility even harder, but I'd like to see more
interactive simulations and tools rather than passive animations, like at
<http://www.socr.ucla.edu/> and <http://phet.colorado.edu/>

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jmitcheson
The front page slider timeout neglects to take into account the loading time
of the first slide. So the first slide seems to only appear for a second and
then the second slide comes in. I never really thought about that before, but
if we make autoscroll timeouts then the first slide should probably have a
longer delay.

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moystard
Looks really interesting, the Internet has a huge potential for making maths
more entertaining. Cannot wait to see more content (especially dynamic one).

There is a bit of frustration when every time you close an article, you land
on the first page instead of the page you were currently viewing (on Firefox
15).

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eckyptang
Great stuff - I'm suitably impressed and that's no mean feat. I look forward
to more content.

There's a lot of exciting and interesting stuff happening at the moment and a
lot of it is coming out of Cambridge. So much to absorb - so little time.

Congratulations at treating IE as a first class citizen as well.

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cbennett
exciting indeed! the beta version of the web/e-book was impressive content-
wise; I'm looking forward to the free apps out this fall to see more
interactive iterations. I'm intrigued by the creator/author behind the
project; it seems to be just one, a recent Cambridge math grads with some
technical chops in web design and graphics. inspiring to see someone build
such a rich digital product with such a well-defined and arguably socially
important purpose; re-framing maths education as colorful, interactive, and
multi-dimensional exploration, rather than just tedious algebraic
manipulations and word problems, could broaden the aspirations of many
students.

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barking
The design is gorgeous, I absolutely love it. Can you learn to design sites
that beautiful or is innate artistic ability a pre-requisite. If the former
can someone point to some good resources/courses.

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tar
I too would like to know about such resources.

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tluyben2
Wouldn't it be nicer if you could double-click anything, see how it was done
(formulae/code), change them, add on to them and share them. I think that's
how this math book could work for a very broad age spectrum.

