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> inaccurate figures in textbooks Sometimes it's not about being accurate, sometimes it's about the figures in the textbook representing unrepresentable, impos
by ElectricalUnion 3y ago
> inaccurate figures in textbooks
Sometimes it's not about being accurate, sometimes it's about the figures in the textbook representing unrepresentable, impossible situations on whatever geometry you're operating on. say euclidean geometry. Casual things like triangles where the sum of internal angles doesn't match π. Triangles where the sum of length of the two smaller sides is larger that the larger side.
Being able to reason about what are supposed to be the constraints of a otherwise impossible system is valuable in itself.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI do agree with that, and I understand there are many things that just plain cannot be represented accurately on paper - whether through drawings or symbolically. But once you draw an illustration of some thing, I'd expect everything about the drawing to be depicting the real thing as accurately as possible, unless explicitly marked otherwise. If you're not doing that, you may as well skip the illustration entirely, because it confuses things more than it helps.