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There is also Joyce's Java Version of Euclid's Elements:

https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...

and I'm still impressed by the custom Unity tools which Freya Holmér uses for her videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds

Wish Geogebra was both more capable and widely used:

https://www.geogebra.org/

That said, these days if I need to plot out something I just use OpenSCAD: https://openscad.org/ (or, the Python-enabled version: https://pythonscad.org/ )


Grant Sanderson's YouTube channel 3blue1brown and his Manim package have made it significantly easier to visualize math computationally: https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown https://3b1b.github.io/manim/index.html

There's also a well supported community version as well: https://www.manim.community/


> and I'm still impressed by the custom Unity tools which Freya Holmér uses for her videos

Speaking of Unity... What blew my mind making a 3D interactive system using it was Quaternions[0]. It makes sense to me now, but that's after many discussions with a coworker having a PhD in mathematics.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion


My father's comment after we finally nagged him into buying the family a copy of the boardgame _Monopoly_ and playing a game:

>If I'd known you kids would get so much math practice from this I would have bought it a long time ago.


Yeah, similarly, a friend of mine's kid got really into Kerbal Space Program. That friend didn't mind his kid playing that one for long periods of time, because there's a ton of real math and physics being used, but the game is relatively fun.

Agreed.

I'm also incredibly grateful --- I was gifted a NeXT Cube by my brother-in-law when I was in college studying graphic design, and I was incredibly put out by the paucity of nice typography features in Quark XPress and Aldus Pagemaker when I came across TeXview.app and remembered checking out the book _TeX and Metafont_ from the local college library when I was a senior in high school --- built that into a career and a series of presentations at TUG conferences where I got to meet him.


Note that it's no longer an actual check --- instead one gets a certificate of deposit at The Bank of San Seriffe:

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html

(I got a physical check for $2.88 for a typo and a point of improvement in _Digital Typography_ --- need to find another so I can get an account....)

If that was not included in your geography lessons see:

https://legacy.geog.ucsb.edu/the-semicolonial-island-nation-...


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check

And one of my favorite quotes on the subject:

> Intelligence: Finding an error in a Knuth text. Stupidity: Cashing that $2.56 check you got.

> — Seen in a Slashdot signature, quoted by Tess O'Connor ( https://www.stgray.com/quotes/programmingquotes.html )


Some of the checks added up to quite a bit more than that (if there's ever another error check for TeX it will be for $327.68), and one notable at a TeX User's Group conference stated that he had cashed a check for $40.96 and was grateful to DEK for it, since it put food on his table when he was a poor starving grad student.

Why not learn a language intended for didactic use?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMIX

has a quite deep corpus and what looks to be a good introduction:

https://www.mmix.cs.hm.edu/getstarted.html

(and I say that as a person who owns a much battered copy of Inman & Inman's _Apple Machine Language_)


Because there aren't any real-world implementations. Why bother with MMIX when you already know it'll never go beyond a toy "hello world" equivalent in an emulator?

MMIX might be good for educational use in an academic setting, but literally anything else would be better if you want to have fun working with it. Nothing beats the magic of seeing your first program run on a real computer.


Unless your toggling switches at the front panel, I don't see this as a meaningful difference.

Interestingly, that was one of the original considerations for _Magic: The Gathering_ --- but somehow, my main (Commander) deck has become an unpocketable behemoth which is tedious to shuffle and which requires a box containing:

- play mat

- dice

- counters

- tokens

(and constant supervision since I had to add a rider to my insurance policy 'cause while my Elvish Archers are no longer in it, some rather valuable cards from when I first started playing are still in it)


Yes, but it was Lotus Improv (and the earlier text-based spreadsheet Javelin) which did it first.

There is also the opensource Flexisheet:

https://github.com/NattyNarwhal/FlexiSheet

which I wish someone would fork and get running again.


This would be a lot more interesting if these folks would release their product/code.

https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/

https://www.inkandswitch.com/inkbase/

are very interesting and promising, but not available for use/experimentation.


We recently open sourced Inkling [1] (which is a spiritual successor to Crosscut) and the iPad Wrapper [2] app we used to prototype Crosscut, Inkling, and other projects. We're also going to share some more similarly-interesting non-essay output from our research in the near future.

[1] https://github.com/inkandswitch/inkling

[2] https://github.com/inkandswitch/wrapper


Thank you.

I'm peripherally involved in a similar project:

https://github.com/IndiePython/myappmaker-sdd

and appreciate anything which could be shared which might be helpful or inform development.

I will note that if you would try either Android or a Windows tablet w/ a Wacom EMR stylus you should be able to get the sort of input you want --- or maybe on a Mac w/ a Wacom One Gen 2 13 inch or Movink 13 or Cintiq w/ Touch display?


Seems very light on math also, with just three texts on it. As much as I respect Bertrand Russell, I'm not sure if _Principia Mathematica_ is the last word on mathematics for the century.

Ironically, Knuth has stated that his idea of _Literate Programming_ is more important than TAoCP.


> As much as I respect Bertrand Russell, I'm not sure if _Principia Mathematica_ is the last word on mathematics for the century.

I feel like they picked it because not much original mathematics is published in book form. Most of the work that shaped the century in mathematics was published as papers.

They might also have picked it because Russell published books that are readable by laypeople, so in the unlikely event that someone tried to read Principia Mathematica because of this list, they could put it down and pick something else by Russell to read instead.


The inclusion of Vonnegut's _Cat's Cradle_ is bizarre --- it posits an impossible substance, with bizarre properties, and examines society in a way I have trouble relating to, and its commentary on science such as it is, is if anything, discouraging.

_Dune_ for its role in inspiring the study of ecology would seem more fitting.

It's unfortunate that a didactic text such as H. Beam Piper's novella "Omnilingual" couldn't be considered instead.


Prions behave a bit like a biological version of ice-nine. It's a novel shape of protein that "teaches" other protein to be shaped like it. Obviously its scope is far more limited than all the world's water, but it's still sobering to think that this risk even exists.

While I agree that the book presents a fairly negative view of science and scientists (it reminds me strongly of Margaret Atwood's more recent Oryx and Crake), the idea of a substance with the properties of ice-9 isn't that ridiculous -- it was actually suggested by Irving Langmuir (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1932) to H.G. Wells as an idea (although Wells never ended up using it)

I see nothing wrong with calling out the dangers of science in the service of the military. I wouldn't assume the list should include only science cheerleading books.

(And probably the Pynchon inclusion in the list dovetails with Kurt Vonnegut's.)


https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24685...

Deracemization in near equilibrium crystallization system Materials of single chirality can also be achieved by deracemization of a racemic mixture to pure enantiomers in a near-equilibrium system. Deracemization processes aim to transform the undesired enantiomer into the desired enantiomer with a high yield of 100%


In Cat's Cradle, "Ice 9" is an idea that sweeps across the world destroying it. It's an allegory.

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