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A story of a designer learning math
- koenbok 10y agoMaker of Framer (http://framer.com http://framer.com) here. Cool to see this popping up on HN. We are a code based interactive design tool, and see many designers use/learn code to experiment with math, real data and physics.
- galfarragem 10y agoWhat's the language used to prototype on Framer? I ask this because it seems that Framer was previously called FramerJS but the code looks like Python.
- hackerboos 10y agoCoffeescript
- mahesh_rm 10y agoKudos to Koen and to the whole Framer Team. They are a passionate and outstandingly competent and available crew, which is constantly giving back to the design/coding/makers community. ps> I use your open source tool cactus on a daily basis: https://github.com/eudicots/Cactus https://github.com/eudicots/Cactus!
- ezekg 10y agoI love Framer and Cactus. Framer really made me fall for CoffeeScript. Cactus inspired me to build https://github.com/themejuice/tj https://github.com/themejuice/tj for WP dev and the corresponding Mac app.
- koenbok 10y agoThanks! You're welcome! PS. I recently rewrote Cactus as a Gulp script. It's called Moonbase: https://github.com/motif/moonbase https://github.com/motif/moonbase
- jimmaswell 10y agoReminds me of making my TI-83 draw a bunch of patterns in high school with TI-BASIC. It had functions to lines, circles, and some others. Some pretty interesting shapes emerged from just trying out various combinations of LINE TAN(X),SIN(X),COS(X),ABS(X) and such, with X being a variable that I'd make the main loop increment between 0 and 359, or sometimes multiple variables, or it being incremented differently than linearly. I wish I'd have cataloged them.
- beachbum8029 10y agoYou should have, then you could have made a self congratulatory blog post about it and posted it to hacker news!
- cableshaft 10y agoI played around with my graphing calculator in the same way, just trying out different equations to see what they looked like, and even made some simple games out of them. I kind of miss that, because I had a much better idea of what different functions looked like on a graph than I do now, when I could actually use them for animations in games (I mostly just use sines and cosines for oscillating animations and log functions for easing).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tantalor 10y agoWhy do the links on this page redirect through Facebook?
- madlynormal 10y agoI'm a self-taught Software Engineer who struggled with basic Math. It's my goal now to go back and learn Mathematics on a deeper level. I'm reading the Book "A Mind for Numbers" by Barbara Oakley. In one of the chapters she goes into detail about how using your minds visual senses can help with grasping abstract mathematical concepts on a deeper level. Your experimentation with Math and Design, to me, is a perfect example of what Barbara was talking about.
- bhalp1 10y agoI'm reading that too. Really enjoying it. It's kind of a bad title for what the book is really about, which is general learning and productivity strategies.
- xenihn 10y agoCheck out the books from https://minireference.com/ https://minireference.com/, I'm currently going through them.
- truth_sentinell 10y agoThat looks extremely awesome, thank you.
- madlynormal 10y agoOrder. After a quick scan, the Authors text seems raw and unfiltered. I'm all for multiple approaches to learning.
- Jugurtha 10y agoIf you're still on your quest (as I am), may I suggest a few books: - "A Course of Higher Mathematics", V. I. Smirnov. - "Differential and Integral Calculus", N. Piskunov. - "Problems in Mathematical Analysis", B. Demidovich. These are amazing, great, books. Demidovich's book is a collection of more than 3000 exercises. Smirnov's book is a course that takes you from what a value means, to advanced topics (5 volumes, in 7 books). Piskunov's book is in-between (course and exercises). These are the books we've used and went to during the first two years of Engineering.
- roesel 10y agoIt took me a while to get over "math" meaning "understanding geometry", but I appreciate the main theme of the article anyway. Some of my art friends could use a little bit of "math" as well.
- bwhthd 10y agoYes, this article hardly understands geometry, and the author has the guts to say they "conquer math". A unit circle does not mean you know anything about math. Calculus is a 100 level class...(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
- hasbroslasher 10y agoAs I recall, most math majors don't even appreciate math in the deep, comprehensive way until the second half of undergrad. It wasn't 'til Complex Analysis my sophomore year that I really began to understand that I was studying something so awe-inspiring - before then it was all "yay derivatives yay matrices".
- tnecniv 10y agoFor me it was when I took proof-based Linear Algebra and probability. I went from having a decent mathematical intuition but struggling in practice to actually getting how to do it and succeeding with it.
- the_watcher 10y agoI was a liberal arts major who lived with a math major. I remember him telling me (while he was battling through Complex Analysis) that he never realized that his math degree would really begin when he stopped seeing numbers (or something to that effect).
- roesel 10y agoI'd say the fifth semester of calculus is the usual time for an "oh wow" moment. It's one of the reasons why not a lot of people experience it. Four semesters of calculus is a heavy price to pay.
- nikki93 10y agoBeing mad at people like this is what makes them shy away from math. This works in any discipline. Let's be helpful and loving, I promise it feels nice, even though high horses are nice too. "Mindstorms" by Seymour Papert is a good book regarding such issues.
- ivan_ah 10y agoGeometry and art are definitely related, and you need to know the equations to generate the drawings. It's amazing how much possibilities are open once you know some basic high school math (see my book https://gum.co/noBSmath https://gum.co/noBSmath). This article is also a nice example of just-in-time learning: learning new material is so much more fun when you have a concrete goal in mind, rather than relying on a "you'll use this later"-promise.
- TY 10y agoLove your book, it was a very concise, to the point refresher of mathematics for me. Also, the progression of topics felt very comfortable to me, almost like my school experience back in the Soviet days (and I mean it in a very positive way). What I'd love and would gladly pay for is an additional exercise book with answers to accompany your book, just like in the spirit of the old textbooks.
- ivan_ah 10y agoI hear you. What would you call that, решебник/сборник? I'm planning to make an exercise generator framework with print(.tex) and web(.html) backends. The early khan-academy exercise framework was pretty awesome since it could generate random problem instances. BTW, which edition of the book do you have? I've been adding exercises and problem sets progressively over the years. Currently there are 55 exercises (mostly Chapter 1) and 284 problems: ~/P/M/M/problems> grep "\\\begin{exercise}" *tex | wc 55 112 2768 ~/P/M/M/problems> grep "\\\begin{problem}" *tex | wc 284 579 12065 In the meantime, you can email me and I can send you the latest version of the book or a standalone document with just the exercises and problem sets.
- TY 10y agoI'd just call it Exercise Book (Сборник упражнений с ответами) - nothing fancy and to the point. I have a dead tree version of the book, purchased from Canadian Amazon. Not sure which printing (if you had multiple), it's at home now and I'm in the office. Thank you for the offer - will email you in a moment.
- cj_marco 10y agoPls checkout - https://betterexplained.com/ https://betterexplained.com/
- big_paps 10y agothis is a fantastic resource !
- mccoyspace 10y agoI'm an artist and professor of digital art so I know right where this writer is coming from. You can't underestimate the importance of Processing in forging this pathway for artists and designers to connect with computer science and mathematics. By sandboxing full featured languages into development environments geared for immediate visual output you open up the possibilities of computation to a whole new class of people. When teaching I can appeal to their experiences in High School math, but now ideas that were very abstract and remote have an immediate, visual presence. It really works. Trig is usually the first big break through (because who wants the animations to just move in a straight line?) but most eventually get to simple linear algebra as they merge and combine elements from multiple arrays of pixel data. It's empowering. In my teaching I've moved from Processing (which is Java-based) to p5js and other tools (like framer) based on html5 and open web standards. I've recently introduced aframe. We'll see what new math skills emerge in art students from working with real-time 3d engines. (edit=fixed typos)
- closed 10y agoThat's really cool. Your comment reminded me a bit of how kids can go from disinterest to total fixation if something involves minecraft. (and I mean that in the best way possible).
- agumonkey 10y agoWhen does one consider math learned ?
- beachbum8029 10y agoWhen you can write a proof for every mathematical statement that is true.
- mathgenius 10y agoWhen you make it your own somehow. Mathematics is not a spectator sport. Nor is it about rote-learning, although some people try to get by on that.
- agumonkey 10y agoBut there's a problem, you have to integrate other thinkings, findings and concepts, it cannot only be an internal game.
- jfe 10y agoI used to think that being a software engineer meant you were intelligent, and worked hard to earn the title, but after working in the industry for 6 years, I decided that, large-scale software project management problems aside, industrial computing just isn't that hard relative to math and the sciences. Once you know a dozen languages and understand the running themes of computing, it's all sort of old-hat. Ironically, as the field has been flooded with young, inexperienced devs to satisfy market demand, the titles of "software developer" or "nerd" have become social badges to indicate one's intelligence and cutting-edge-ness. We use 50-year-old operating systems and call ourselves innovators. Maybe, like Groucho Marx, I just don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member, but I think that if you're looking to level-up intellectually, studying math and science, but especially math, is the way to do it. I was never good at math, but I've spent the past year teaching myself calculus and the struggle has been well worth the expansion in my world-view.
- zbobet2012 10y agoI think "industrial computing just isn't that hard relative to math and the sciences" is only true if you are working on a limited set of applications. In my job as a software engineer, I've had to: Invent new algorithms and prove their correctness. Formalize datatypes as CRDTs. Design (and model check) a specialized distributed consensus algorithm. Read and implement _many_ algorithms from academic papers, including motion vector estimation. And build complex statistical models. All of the above require either formal use or the actual practice of mathematics. Sometimes very advanced mathematics including multivariate calculus, statistics, graph theory, number theory, category theory, and so on. I guess what I'm saying is, software engineering can be as easily as challenging as math and science. Because at its "peak", it is math and science. Not all mathematicians and scientist work on hard problems. Not all software engineers do either. But don't be to quick to judge the field based on a limited sample size.
- protomikron 10y agoCan you elaborate on what you worked on? Was it part of academics or industry? I guess it was embedded systems, as these domain seems pretty open to formalization (as they are pretty low-level), as they often demand high reliability.
- agjacobson 10y agoReminds me of doodles I made when I was around 9. I had a ruler, a compass, and a pen; no computer.
- cj_marco 10y agoAny thoughts about M.C. Escher?
- fibo 10y agoHi all', I am graduated in mathematics. I studied a lot and also teached sometimes, but I am working as a programmer, I am not a teached, I teached to gain some money while I was studying. I love math and I Can explain It to everyoneishappy, I have this superpotere I Can male people under stand also deeply advanced mathematics. I noticed that a lot of people "hates" math but they like It, they have a bad Memory about Who teached them when they were young, so they say "i hate math" but they actually hate their first teacher. As soon as somebody explain them math with Joy and without humiliation if they don't know, they really like It. The point is that even the highest mathematician does not know, cause in math there Will Always bè misteriose.