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by telchar 2983 days ago
I appreciate any effort to make mathematical explanations more intuitive. A couple of thoughts:

1. There are a few grammatical errors (missing word, missing comma) that are forgivable but I find that any imprecision in language is a big detriment for a student trying to understand an explanation. I tend to get hung up on those since, not knowing the material, I can't resolve ambiguities with context. Since subtleties are important in math it would be worthwhile to go over the explanations again with a fine-toothed comb to ensure there are no typos or amphiboly.

2. The visuals aren't always clear. For example, volumes don't show edges so it's hard to make out that you're seeing a volume rather than an irregular area (and which volume you're seeing). Also I think a caption to each image could be useful, to describe how the shape demonstrates the concept. Something like "this visual represents a shear transformation of the matrix described above", just to be really explicit and clear.

1 comments

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

> There are a few grammatical errors (missing word, missing comma) that are forgivable but I find that any imprecision in language is a big detriment for a student trying to understand an explanation. I tend to get hung up on those since, not knowing the material, I can't resolve ambiguities with context. Since subtleties are important in math it would be worthwhile to go over the explanations again with a fine-toothed comb to ensure there are no typos or amphiboly.

Yeah, this is a pet peeve of mine for sure. I am not very precise when it comes to written prose.

I was thinking of airtasking out a grammar check, since I'm pretty awful at catching my own mistakes here. I might just do that.

> The visuals aren't always clear. For example, volumes don't show edges so it's hard to make out that you're seeing a volume rather than an irregular area (and which volume you're seeing). Also I think a caption to each image could be useful, to describe how the shape demonstrates the concept. Something like "this visual represents a shear transformation of the matrix described above", just to be really explicit and clear.

Great idea. I've added it to my list at https://github.com/smspillaz/intuitive-math/issues/8