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Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental question here is one which I don't think there is an agreed-upon answer for:

>What does an algorithm look like?

I am working on a rather visually-oriented tool, and while I did a fair bit of early development using BlockSCAD, and also have access to OpenSCAD Graph Editor, it hasn't made sense to show the algorithms visually because it's a lot of work making them suitably expressive.

One almost wishes that the specialized library used for:

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

was published and widely used.

Similarly, why can't we have more things such as:

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

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The library developed and used by 3blue1brown [1] is open-source [2] and seems to fit the same use case. I don’t know about widely-used, though.

[1] https://3blue1brown.com [2] https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim

An example I'll call out is an art show I saw by

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

a 'conspiracy theorist' who died mysteriously in 2000 at the age of 48. He would make large numbers of pencil sketches (50+) that started out as hairballs and gradually he'd try different layouts until they told a clear story. (At least some of the conspiracies, such as BCCI, were real, thus the quotes)

The same kind of work is necessary if you want to reveal some network of relationships that is essential to understanding some technological system, rule base, etc.

I cannot find any of his work in high-resolution but those diagrams are exhilarating. Thank you.

As a kid I felt algebra >> geometry (like I want to divide an angle by three and why waste my time with a system that can't! sure you can learn what a system can and can't do but that can be taught more directly with examples from computing) so as much as I read about Elements in math books by the likes of Martin Gardner it struck me as serious malpractice that "Great Books" advocates wanted kids to read it. (It's better than reading Newton's Principia if you want to learn physics or calculus though...)

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.)

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.

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