
Penrose: From mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams - amazing_stories
http://penrose.ink/siggraph20
======
stared
In this line - I enjoyed playing Euclidea
([https://www.euclidea.xyz/](https://www.euclidea.xyz/)) a minimalistic game
on Euclidean geometry. The specification of geometry looks similar to the one
from the game.

...

Side note: when I hear "Penrose diagrams" I have in mind Penrose tensor
notation, as in [https://www.math3ma.com/blog/matrices-as-tensor-network-
diag...](https://www.math3ma.com/blog/matrices-as-tensor-network-diagrams).

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nsajko
The _Byrne_ they mention is Oliver Byrne, who made a book of Elements of
Euclid including colored graphics for the geometry.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Byrne_(mathematician)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Byrne_\(mathematician\))

Archive.org, print:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628606)

In TeX: [https://github.com/jemmybutton/byrne-
euclid](https://github.com/jemmybutton/byrne-euclid)

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Xophmeister
As a recovering mathematician, this fills me with joy. It would be great if it
were implemented as, say, a LaTeX package, so the code to your diagrams could
sit right in your documents (like how TikZ works). Still, either way, amazing
work!

~~~
Myrmornis
It will be great to include Penrose diagrams in LaTeX documents. But Penrose
is implemented in Haskell and I'm pretty sure no-one would want to see what it
would look like were it implemented in TeX!

~~~
Xophmeister
Oh sure, reimplementing in TeX would not be worth thinking about! I'm not
familiar with exactly how TeX packages work, but I assumed they could call out
to external tools that return the necessary (La)TeX commands (e.g., code
syntax highlighters work like this, IIRC).

~~~
Myrmornis
OK, I see. Sorry yes I agree what you're saying is sensible and what I said
was silly.

Yes, minted works like that -- it starts a python child process to use
pygments to do the syntax highlighting. But with minted and TikZ there's a
single element of "source code" in the LaTeX file (a code listing or tikz code
fragment respectively) that maps to a single element in the output (syntax-
highlighted code, or a TiKZ image). Whereas with Penrose, there would be
multiple source code files (the style and substance code). I'm not sure it
quite fits the native LaTeX model does it? Maybe it's better just to use Make
to generate the Penrose diagram for inclusion via \includegraphics?

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peter_d_sherman
This looks beautiful! And strange! And beautiful! Like the diagrams for an
entire Calculus textbook could be created with it...(!)

 _Penrose, for mathematical drawings, might very well become what TeX, LaTeX,
and Desktop Publishing programs are, to text!_

I think you are on the right track to something grand!

Wishing you a lot of luck in this endeavor!

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mark_l_watson
It is ready for public use yet - I wish they had put that information sooner
in the article.

That said, looks cool and it is written in Haskell and React:
[https://github.com/penrose/penrose](https://github.com/penrose/penrose)

~~~
sealjam
I assume you mean "it is _not_ ready for public use yet"?

~~~
mark_l_watson
Yes, thanks.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
Stuff like this could be amazing for pedagogy. It’s automatically generating
_different_ ways of looking at a topic. I’m sure authors would love to include
these different viewpoints were it not for the effort involved, so making it
easy could be great!

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layoutIfNeeded
Oh, I thought this was about the Penrose graphical notation for tensors:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation)

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2sk21
So this is written in Haskell - very impressive demo of the languages
capabilities.

~~~
hbogert
You mean that it can create decent parsers?

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dunefox
That is a beautiful document!

