Perhaps the tech is settling down, I'm not sure.

It's also hard to focus on design, coding and content solo, and writing great, cohesive content tends to be a private endeavour. I'm not surprised to see immersivemath.com is written by a team.

I know (through fond memory!) your texts have some interactivity in hyperlinking to solutions and I found that very useful, but making it work must have taken time and been a bit of a headache. Extrapolate that to writing a webapp and it's easy to imagine you would never finish.

And yes, the words 'legendary' and 'classic' are direct compliments to you: your Lin Alg sits next to Spivak's Calculus on my bookshelf. They are both immortal.

And you include solutions for your exercises? This is fantastic! Do you have any plans to write something like this for functional analysis?

Do you have a timeline for the release of the book? Would you have any interest in writing an Abstract Algebra text?

Several years. I have a very early draft, no doubt full of errors, that I am teaching from. It is linked-to from the linear page.

> Would you have any interest in writing an Abstract Algebra text?

Sorry, no. But all my stuff is Free and you could take the .cls file, etc. Go nuts.

It is very hard to feel confident in learning when I have no way to gauge if I am on the right track or not.

Thanks again.

The technological endurance of LaTeX is legendary, though

And JavaScript itself (for better or worse) isn't going anywhere, it is literally "too big to fail" at this point.

I'm a web developer and have been following this space since the Web came out, these are just my best educated guesses. I would deem "developing with a target of HTML5/Canvas/JS/emscripten/wasm" to be future-proof for the foreseeable future (the next 10 years).

BONUS: You may already know about being able to convert LaTeX to HTML5 via JS, but just in case you haven't, this is pretty cool: https://latex.js.org/

I'll trade you. I perceive that the standard for conversion at this point, which you may not know about, is https://www.tug.org/tex4ht/.

(Sorry, do you know the author of the latex.js package? I would like to contact him.)

Perhaps your free book can be used to develop some evolving tool for the student. For example: the student take a test and then the book select the best exercises and topics for that student.

I notice that there is an option to buy your book, and perhaps there are other options to somehow get money to you. I was wondering if you felt comfortable revealing approximately how much money has come to you as a result of your (donated) labours?

I sell hard copies on Amazon. Well, really Orthogonal Publishing L3C sells them. This is a limited-profit company that Lon Mitchell set up to publish Free texts. Naturally we round the price up rather than down so there is some money. Since Amazon's price, $21.95, is not far from the price of media, you can guess that there is not much money. I'm reluctant to quote exact numbers but the dollar amount is not much, especially per hour.

However, my school, St Michael's College, has the wisdom to give me professional credit for the work so that counts for a lot.

Cheers.

You can even see it for yourself. This guy started this project 3 years ago. Fast forward to today we can see that his youtube channel has 500 subscribers and most of his videos have around 1k views...this is after 2-3 years of each video being uploaded. Basically, no one is using this site. It is no surprise that we see so many of these education type projects being half built. The developers eventually toss in the towel.

Personally I think we need a combination of both to really change education though - open educational resources and the associated tools to learn the subject better. Preferably free but also low cost might work or supported by donations.

Right now the big publishers pretty much control the entire market. They own the content and they create the tools. Then they spoon feed it to university faculty (by making tools to basically "drag and drop" the content for teachers) and the student/taxpayers ends up footing the bill for it.

Since I create educational projects (luckily, Quantum Game with Photons http://quantumgame.io/ was partially supported by an outreach grant; all other writings and stuff - not so much), I would love to see some way to support such endeavors.

Also I looked at your game and I really love it. It is so much fun (even though I don't know much about quantum physics). Now just imagine if we have a traditional college-level subject, such as quantum physics, and then use tools like your game to help people learn better. You still learn all the usual topics but the overall learning experience is made SIGNIFICANTLY better by having these extra tools to use to learn. Your game is an educational game but using the same technology used to create that game could also be used to create all sorts of things - experiment simulation, interactive graphics etc.

I wouldn't say there is no innovation though. There are science-based games (https://github.com/stared/science-based-games-list; it was here some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14661813). I started collecting interactive machine learning, stats and maths: http://p.migdal.pl/interactive-machine-learning-list/ (a lot of things; of course, Immersive Linear Algebra is there). Most of these projects are side projects, though.

Also - I had a plan to extend the quantum game (it is nice to hear you enjoyed it!) to more particles... and then, a full course, with experimental widgets (e.g. showing interference, then explaining it, then giving space to play with it). With some framework (maybe $, but I care even more for collaborators and deadlines), I would love to continue that.

What are your projects?

Luckily we have interactive notebooks (like Jupyter) and MathJax for LaTeX. You can have all the beauty of LaTeX typesetting in your browser and make it highly pedagogical with interactive computation.

I don't mind if a book skips some details and I have to fill it in myself, for example drawing a diagram to help understand a key point.

Perhaps in school most people treat maths more mechanically, and exploring requires more mathematical maturity. I don't think some basic animations will improve that directly.

That being said, people like 3b1b on YouTube are in the intersection of people who can animate and know the maths. They certainly produce things which spark the imagination.

Compare Dirac's book on general relativity with one people actually read(To learn from) and you'll see why hand-holding and diagrams are helpful

My guess on the funding is spare time and spare university resources.

We have much better tools right now such as Jupyter notebook which as accessible to everyone. However, your concept of hyper textbook is intriguing.

What do you mean by that? Can a webpage be an hypertextbook? Then aren't all online books already hypertext books?

Anyways, I am working to build a different medium of learning called Primer. The courses on Primer are basically books that teaches you through conversation. It offers much more than that though. Creates latex pdf, generates flash cards , implements SRS etc. Can you check if Primer matches your description of Hypertextbook.

www.primerlabs.io

I will change the front page once I launch in March.

The website works well in Dekstop only.

Thanks!

Primer looks like an interesting system - I'm on the mailing list, good luck!

https://ximera.osu.edu/mooculus