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A Coloring Book about Group Theory
- jonmarkgo 9y agoThis is awesome. I've never really understood group theory before, but this helps a lot
- killjoywashere 9y agoThis is awesome, but can't I just buy the thing?
- alexberke 9y agoIt's still a work in progress so it's not yet published, but it will be by the end of the year! Thanks for asking! Until then you can print the PDF for free or play online: http://coloring-book.co/book.pdf http://coloring-book.co/book.pdf
- akud 9y agoAre you the author? This is a great idea - I've been thinking about doing this with graph theory. Here's an example: https://plus.google.com/+AlexKudlick/posts/MWNRWTRATgA https://plus.google.com/+AlexKudlick/posts/MWNRWTRATgA I've been building tools lately; for now, a graph editor. Hit me up if you're interested in talking about tools for creating this sort of content, I'd be interested to know more about your approach. My email is in my profile.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoIt would be nice if there were a color pallet and a fill tool, so you could color in the digital version, then watch the animations with the colors.
- posterboy 9y agolink suffocated? Github has the code but no pdf? https://github.com/aberke/coloring-book?files=1 https://github.com/aberke/coloring-book?files=1 edit: btw, raphael.js looks good, I wanted to animate trees for a long time.
- gldalmaso 9y agoHN should really tag some posts with (WIP).
- killjoywashere 9y agoWhich would be the most HN tag ever.
- DrScump 9y agoWarning: on Chrome, anyway, this is a clicktrap from which you cannot back-navigate out.
- theoh 9y agoNot free, but related + possibly complementary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11745486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11745486
- vardhanw 9y agoAny prerequisites? Age or education? Can this be given to high school kids?
- jacobolus 9y agoTry reading it. Definitely accessible to HS kids if not younger.
- catnaroek 9y agoAnd they won't learn any group theory from it.
- jacobolus 9y agoWhy do you think that? The basic ideas of group theory are definitely accessible to grade schoolers, and even the fancier parts of an undergraduate group theory course (Sylow theorems, etc.) are accessible to high school students who go through the work. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Nathan Carter’s lovely book Visual Group Theory to any bright 15 year old. But for a (say) 10-year-old, just learning about the symmetries of shapes and tilings is plenty of useful and interesting math.
- catnaroek 9y agoThe Sylow theorems are by no means “fancy”. If you don't understand them, then you don't know group theory, plain and simple. Now, we can debate the merits of exposing children to groups before they can understand group theory. But learning group theory means learning (0) the axiomatic definitions of group, subgroup, coset, etc. (1) the main theorems in group theory and their proofs.
- alexberke 9y agosome of those things are on the book's Theory Reference page, which is linked to be some of the underlined concepts in the book: http://www.coloring-book.co/#!/theory-reference http://www.coloring-book.co/#!/theory-reference
- enraged_camel 9y agoNot sure why it got flag-killed. I vouched it. (The flagging system is in serious need of review or overhaul. At the very least, users should be required to provide a reason, which is then made publicly visible as anonymous comments.)
- sillysaurus3 9y agoNah, it's working fine. You vouched it. That's democracy, and one of my all-time favorite features of the site. Mods also override flags and rollback the submission time on certain stories, particularly when they're substantive or offer new information. FWIW, I couldn't figure out how to use this site. I tried scrolling down and clicking around and nothing was happening. Eventually I spotted the "next page" link at the very bottom, but I imagine some of the flags came due to similar reasons.
- enraged_camel 9y agoNo, the problem is that if I had not vouched it when I did, it would probably have fallen off the front page and never seen by most of the readers. Timing makes a huge difference and that's why the feature is broken and regularly abused. In any case, page usability has never been a valid reason for flagging a site. Flags are usually reserved for sites that are grossly off-topic, sleazy, etc. Which again makes me wish flag reasons were a thing.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoThe mods will take care of cases like that, especially if you email them. The total amount of time on the front page will end up fair one way or the other. I didn't mean to imply that it was flagged for usability. I was saying I didn't even notice there was more to the site at all. People may have thought it was just a splash screen. It's more than a bit presumptuous to say we know better than the mods. Unlike downvoting (which is just straight-up broken at this point), the flagging/vouch system is primarily to aid the mods in their duties. If it made more work for them, they'd have to overhaul it. But it alleviates work, so it's working fine. Also, you did vouch it. Which is just another way of saying that the current system worked.
- riffraff 9y agowait, is the thing in the shapes & symmetry page a dragonfly? Don't dragonflies have a thinner body and longer more separated wings? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Mesurupetala%2C_dragonfly%2C_Late_Late_Jurassic%2C_Tithonian_Age%2C_Solnhofen_Lithographic_Limestone%2C_Solnhofen%2C_Bavaria%2C_Germany_-_Houston_Museum_of_Natural_Science_-_DSC01817.JPG/440px-thumbnail.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Me...
- yorwba 9y agoGoogle reverse image search finds this http://designingflicks.com/images/leopard-moth-svg-1.png http://designingflicks.com/images/leopard-moth-svg-1.png which says "Leopard Moth" in the image path, and it does look more like a moth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_leopard_moth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_leopard_moth
- alexberke 9y agoI wish I had had an earlier consultation from an insect specialist. Thank you for catching that!
- amsheehan 9y agoYou never asked!
- TheeKslay 9y agoWORLDS FIRST TAP DANCING STRIPPER #Kslay https://youtu.be/tyBYK5fXbP4 https://youtu.be/tyBYK5fXbP4
- catnaroek 9y agoA “book on group theory” with no reference to the Sylow theorems, Lagrange's theorem or Cayley's theorem? Maybe this should be called “a book that illustrates gadgets that happen to have group structure”.
- yasserkaddour 9y agoAccording to the author the book is still work in progress, it would be more productive to raise an issue or make a PR on github. https://github.com/aberke/coloring-book https://github.com/aberke/coloring-book
- vog 9y agoI hope this doesn't sound too negative, but if not a single one of these topics is even mentioned in an outline, I wouldn't have much hope that opening an issue (let alone making a PR) would make a difference. This would be like asking the Nano developers how they plan to support Emacs-Lisp macros. In other words, adjusting the title (to prevent wrong expectations) would be more productive than expanding the scope far beyond what the author(s) had in mind.
- gus_massa 9y agoThe problem is that the author of the book and the previous comment are talking about different books with a different scope, because each one has a different idea of what "group theory" means, it depends a lot of your background. This book is about symmetry and group definitions, but it has no or very little details about generic properties of groups. The previous comment is about a book that no one has written, that is a coloring book for students of a math major in the university, probably in the 2nd or 3rd year. In this (unwritten) book the idea is to study the general theorems about groups, and in each case give some visual examples to color and apply the theorem.
- catnaroek 9y agoOnly one of those is group theory.
- celticninja 9y agoWhy do sites still hijack the back button?
- hpcjoe 9y agoShowed this to my wife (a math/physics high school teacher). She loved it! Not sure if she will use this in her STEAM club, but it is possible. Thanks for the link!
- kafkaesq 9y agoHa! As it they would allow kids these days to even so much as look at a book that's not specifically designed to help them pass their standardized tests.
- mcherm 9y agoSTEAM club -- this is an activity outside of the normal curriculum.
- hpcjoe 9y agoHappily not all teachers teach to the tests. STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art Math) is all about trying to stoke interest in these paths. She's holding her first event today. FWIW: I've seen districts where parents don't care, and she's student taught in some of these. It is terrible, as the kids aren't there to learn, the teachers are stressed out and unhappy, and the parents don't give a damn. The place where she is now is a college prep school. Hard core academic criteria to graduate, not just passing tests. Strong incentives from parents to kids to work hard, though not all do.
- alexberke 9y agoIt's great to hear that from you! I'd really like to get this in the hands of HS students. Please have your wife reach out to me! colorbymath@gmail.com
- kazinator 9y agoNot about group theory per se, but a nice illustration of some translations, rotations and reflections applied to 2D shapes, which have group-theoretic descriptions (that we can learn about in some other book).
- alexberke 9y ago(I'm the author) I've really been struggling with how to frame it! It has group theory concepts but is really about symmetry and other parts of math. I'm looking for ideas of how to talk about it and frame it -- please share your thoughts!
- Raphmedia 9y agoThe small animation when changing page makes me dizzy and almost sick. Might want to remove that and allow regular scroll. The "pages" are not even full height, you still need to scroll anyway.
- alexberke 9y ago(author here) Thanks for the feedback. The idea was to mimic flipping through the pages of a book.