Re:Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)
by WillAdams on Thursday January 16, 2025 @06:55AM
(#42724138)
I dunno, I've been including links to Euclid's Elements, Joyce's Java version at:
https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing
and I think that the rigor which it imparts is a good thing (but ask me that again after I've finished reading Hilbert/Cohn-Vossen's _Geometry and the Imagination_ which I just ordered from the AMS) --- after that I need to read _Projective Geometric Algebra Illuminated_ by Eric Lengyel and hopefully out of all this I'll arrive at the understanding I need to finish up the next aspect of my current project (though I would accept recommendations on books on conic sections).
tldr; I think Euclid should be included in math studies, but not as a sole text, more as an "ultimate authority" so that there is some commonality to logical processes and proofs.
I like what that site is trying to do but the upper levels don't communicate the affordances you would find if you drilled in. Also there is graph structure in Elements that I don't see visualized; also Elements uses a lot of weird vocabulary that would be a lot easier to deal with if it were hyperlinked to a glossary.
I've been interested in old Asian texts like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kojiki and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms where I have, charitably, 5% reading comprehension of the language but could get a lot with the graph structure materialized (like the chain of succession from Amaterasu to the Emperor) and also would like to see the original text, plus human-generated English translation if available, LLM-based translations, links to properly resolved characters and words in the dictionary, etc. (Right now I am digging into about 800,000 images with Chinese language metadata with some crude tools, really just getting out named entities makes me tickled pink.)