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I had an idea for a couple of years now of creating a wikipedia-style mathematics textbook that will be crowd-sourced, standardized and cover all of math in a w

by vlasev 13y ago

I had an idea for a couple of years now of creating a wikipedia-style mathematics textbook that will be crowd-sourced, standardized and cover all of math in a way that's accessible to learn from on your own. It would have a kind of a zoom function where you can expand details on explanations and calculations to a depth that you prefer. Ideally this kind of thing would start off with basic math and get progressively further into mathematics like the roots of a tree.

sedeki 13y ago
I would be really interested in following and/or contributing to this project.
marcosdumay 13y ago
Your "basic" in basic Math means "foundational", or "what we teach to children"?
- vlasev 13y ago
  That's a good question. In the spirit of making learning easier it would perhaps "start" with what we teach children. However, that might be ultimately misguided because that would just mimic the curriculum and force the whole thing into a box. But then again the math knowledge itself forces a structure on any such textbook because to know A you need to know B, C, D, etc. This is further complicated by the fact that most subjects in math can be approached from multiple equivalent angles. For example, complex analysis can be taught from the complex derivative perspective or from the power series perspective equally well. Ideally the format of the whole thing will allow the student to naturally learn things from the angle they understand better.
ivan_ah 13y ago
That is not a bad idea at all.,, It will be a lot of work but it could be done. Crowd sourcing might lead to the wikipedia-style schizophrenic-author voice of writing, though. See [1] for a prev discussion. Interestingly, if the book is organized so it is aligned to the common core math standard[2], it would make a killing in the US market since current textbooks are so bad. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456397 [2] http://www.corestandards.org/Math/ http://www.corestandards.org/Math/

by vlasev 13y ago

sedeki 13y ago

I would be really interested in following and/or contributing to this project.

marcosdumay 13y ago

Your "basic" in basic Math means "foundational", or "what we teach to children"?

vlasev 13y ago
That's a good question. In the spirit of making learning easier it would perhaps "start" with what we teach children. However, that might be ultimately misguided because that would just mimic the curriculum and force the whole thing into a box. But then again the math knowledge itself forces a structure on any such textbook because to know A you need to know B, C, D, etc. This is further complicated by the fact that most subjects in math can be approached from multiple equivalent angles. For example, complex analysis can be taught from the complex derivative perspective or from the power series perspective equally well. Ideally the format of the whole thing will allow the student to naturally learn things from the angle they understand better.

ivan_ah 13y ago

That is not a bad idea at all.,, It will be a lot of work but it could be done. Crowd sourcing might lead to the wikipedia-style schizophrenic-author voice of writing, though. See [1] for a prev discussion. Interestingly, if the book is organized so it is aligned to the common core math standard[2], it would make a killing in the US market since current textbooks are so bad. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7456397 [2] http://www.corestandards.org/Math/ http://www.corestandards.org/Math/