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Ask HN: Computer-assisted prosthetic/workflow for math?
Hi, I often come up with fragments of algorithm ideas in my head. I want a tool to enhance the breadth/depth of material I can get out of one unit of study effort. Is there any tool out there that can make use of my sketching process to give me contextually relevant information?
I can jot the ideas down on a whiteboard, or on my iPad. Very much of it is sketches of the transformations I'm thinking of. I can barely start reasoning about things otherwise (ie. at a linguistic-syntactic level) before getting good pictures. Once I've got the pictures, I can tackle the algebra, or the code, but it all starts with the pictures.
btw these things would be awesome if they existed..:
- sketch -> sketch search: context-appropriate diagram reverse-image search: the same way that The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) helps mathematicians discover surprising links between numbers, is there a good way to search for related diagrams of things, just based on the 'meta-math', rather than the math itself? - note: this reminds me a lot of Hoogle, in a way
- sketch -> lemma/theorem search: could you combine sketch parsing + e.g. Lean's mathlib library of theorems, to show me things I might find useful, before I have even made the connection myself?