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An Infinitely Large Napkin [pdf]
- mgradowski 5y agoThis book exposed me to proper math back in high school, I liked it.
- quirino 5y agoEvan Chen is a very valuable person in the Math Olympiad scene. The Geometry book [1] he wrote in high school is required reading for any serious competitor and I believe he is the main responsible for some bringing some techniques into the olympic meta, such as Barycentric Coordinates. Also, his blog post [2] about writing is one of the best ones I've ever read. [1] https://web.evanchen.cc/geombook.html https://web.evanchen.cc/geombook.html [2] https://blog.evanchen.cc/2015/03/14/writing/ https://blog.evanchen.cc/2015/03/14/writing/
- dezren39 5y agothank you for this comment this turned my day around
- voidhorse 5y agoSeems like a really interesting person. Off topic, but his assertions that the majority of students are “conned” into thinking math is important is strange to me. Almost everyone I know always knew they’d never need to know the Pythagorean theorem for the vast majority of life’s obstacles—they weren’t tricked into thinking it was important, they learned it because as a kid you don’t have any power and are coerced to complete certain tests to make your way along a certain circumscribed educational track.
- tuatoru 5y agoThe Pythagorean theorem is really useful for any construction. Builders use it regularly. More experienced DIYers also use it. Not a good example of rarely used schoolbook learning. How about obscure stuff about hyperbolic trig functions (sinh, tanh and so on)?
- voidhorse 5y agoI actually just had to use some sin/cos the other day while programming some audio stuff so there ya go. Not so useless after all.
- alanbernstein 5y agoI remember telling a friend once in high school, that I was kind of happy to find a good real-world use for cubic polynomials. She asked what it was, so I started "well I was programming..." and she interrupted, "of course math is useful for programming, that doesn't count".
- Cauchy2022 5y agoOff-topic: Mobile version only loads the title page of the book and leaves all remaining pages blank. I thought that was the joke.
- lupire 5y agoIt's 900pages (but under 10MB on disk) so your app might have trouble getting it into memory.
- tartakovsky 5y ago1. Not off topic. 2. Mobile version of what, it’s a pdf. 3. I can see the full text on my iPhone.
- apollo1213 5y agoYou can read the PDF directly in browser: https://docmadeeasy.com/v/484772290 https://docmadeeasy.com/v/484772290
- Cauchy2022 5y agoYea on my Android app, pages such as Twitter and pdf cannot be loaded and displayed properly, and I have to open browser to see the actual content.
- joecool1029 5y agoThere's a way to work around this using Android firefox (or a fork) with Android pdf.js extension. Mozilla is making this hard by not blessing this extension even though it uses one of their own developed pieces of software. For some reason Android app devs think it's perfectly normal to not be able to open pdf's in a browser tab.
- Cauchy2022 5y agoThe Material app on Android. Loading pdf in app and it turns out that I can only see the first page followed by endless blank pages
- jimmyvalmer 5y agoNever heard the author, but having read his blog, I've concluded I am this guy modulo the talent and the fact that he got to my way of thinking in half the time.
- dang 5y agoA bit of past discussion: An Infinitely Large Napkin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20168936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20168936 - June 2019 (32 comments) An Infinitely Large Napkin [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467506 - Sept 2016 (3 comments)
- tgtefstg 5y ago