[HN Gopher] This open problem taught me what topology is [video]
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       This open problem taught me what topology is [video]
        
       Author : surprisetalk
       Score  : 473 points
       Date   : 2024-12-25 06:08 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
        
       | Oarch wrote:
       | It's great that he revisited this problem.
       | 
       | It was his original video on this topic which had me instantly
       | hooked to 3B1B all those years ago.
        
       | Darthy wrote:
       | I've got a problem with that video that starts at 4:15. He seems
       | to jump to the conclusion that for every midpoint there is only 1
       | distance. But that midpoint is formed by picking 2 points on the
       | edge, and one could easily pick two other points on the edge that
       | have the same midpoint (but have a different distance). He did
       | not address that point at that point in the video, and for the
       | next 2 minutes I kept raising that point in my mind. After he
       | continued down that path not addressing that point, I felt that I
       | must have missed something, or that more intelligent math viewers
       | would have solved that open question in the mind in seconds and I
       | am not mathematically inclined enough to be the target audience.
       | And I stopped watching that video.
       | 
       | I think good educational videos are the result of a process where
       | a trial audience raises such points and the video gets constantly
       | refined, so that the end video is even good for people who
       | question every point.
        
         | Avshalom wrote:
         | he maps two points (by using their midpoint) and a distance to
         | the (x,y,foo) if it was two different points with the same
         | midpoint but different distance it would map to (x,y,bar)
        
         | suryajena wrote:
         | Great point now we can raise the issue and he will do a
         | revision 3, with even better explanation for those issues just
         | like in the books.
        
         | darthoctopus wrote:
         | this is not a conclusion that he jumps to! all that is stated
         | is that there is a mapping from every pair of points on a curve
         | to a set of 3D coordinates specified by their midpoints and
         | distances. there is no requirement for uniqueness here. in
         | fact, the whole point of this is to turn the search for an
         | inscribed rectangle into the search for two pairs of points on
         | the curve that have the same midpoint and distance --- this is
         | stated just 1 min 15 seconds after the timestamp that you point
         | out.
        
         | Masterjun wrote:
         | He addresses this at 9:00 in the video. You're thinking of a
         | function graph, but he never made a function. He just sets up a
         | visualization of a set of 3D points.
        
         | raincole wrote:
         | > I think good educational videos are the result of a process
         | where a trial audience raises such points and the video gets
         | constantly refined, so that the end video is even good for
         | people who question every point.
         | 
         | It would be at least as long as a one-semester course in
         | typical math major then.
         | 
         | To address your specific question: he doesn't assume each
         | midpoint has only one distance _at all_. He doesn 't say it and
         | the visualization doesn't show it as so.
        
         | mauricioc wrote:
         | The function defined in the video is "Given a pair of points A
         | and B on the curve, output (x, y, z), where (x, y) is the
         | midpoint and z is the length of the segment connecting A and
         | B", and the pictures are of its image, not its graph. But if
         | you define it visually, then it's very natural to misunderstand
         | it the way you did, since the picture looks a lot like a
         | function graph of a function which takes midpoints (instead of
         | pairs of points) and returns the distance corresponding to that
         | midpoint (which is not well-defined, as you pointed out). If
         | this happens, the viewer is then completely lost, since the
         | rest of the video is dedicated to explaining that the domain of
         | this function is a Mobius strip when you consider it to consist
         | of _unordered_ pairs of points {A, B} (as one should).
         | 
         | Ultimately, if you don't have a 100% formal version of a given
         | statement, some people will find a interpretation different
         | from the intended one (and this is independent of how clever
         | the audience is!). I think 3Blue1Brown knows this and is
         | experimenting with alternate formats; the video is also
         | available as an interactive blog post
         | (https://www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/inscribed-rect-v2) which
         | explicitly defines the function as "f(A, B) = (x, y, z)" and
         | explains what the variables are.
         | 
         | The fact that "given a large enough audience (even of very
         | smart people), there will be different interpretations of any
         | given informal explanation" is a key challenge in teaching
         | mathematics, since it is very unpredictable. In interactive
         | contexts it is possible to interrupt a lecture and ask
         | questions, but it still provides an incentive to focus on
         | formalism, which can leave less time for explaining
         | visualizations and intuition.
        
         | looneysquash wrote:
         | I'm don't feel like I really get the distinction between a
         | mapping and a function, or a visualization and a graph.
         | 
         | But he was careful to point out that it wasn't a graph.
         | 
         | To me the key point is that the input is all three variables,
         | the two points and their midpoint, and not just the midpoint.
        
       | suryajena wrote:
       | This video if it was a scientific paper I would have visualised
       | absolutely nothing. I don't know that if we can submit/embed
       | animations instead of PDFs for university classroom work/
       | scientific papers, because that's really much better than having
       | to read papers/PDFs that is so incomplete without the right
       | imagination/visualization of the problem. The last time I was
       | giving a mock seminar in my university using a GIF to explain the
       | RRT algorithm I was warned to not use animations in presentations
       | . . . I mean either it was really not that helpful to visualise
       | the solution or it has to do something with age old standards
       | that needs to be revised. I mean figures can only do 3 or 4
       | frames isn't more frames better.
        
         | szundi wrote:
         | What if you print it? Your presentation is useless then /s
        
           | yapyap wrote:
           | 1 frame at a time
        
         | formerly_proven wrote:
         | PDF supports embedded, interactively manipulatable 2D and 3D
         | graphics/objects.
        
           | atoav wrote:
           | That word "support" does a lot of heavy lifting there. A bit
           | like in "Email supports end to end encryption".
           | 
           | You are not wrong, but if you had to bet your life on
           | somebody being able to get the information and you don't know
           | _how_ they are going to view that PDF would you do it?
        
           | ykonstant wrote:
           | I've never bothered to look into a TeX based way to do this;
           | is it something that can be done with TikZ/PGF?
        
           | Qwertious wrote:
           | PDF supports being printed out onto paper.
        
         | dsign wrote:
         | Careful where you say that :-)
         | 
         | In 2002, when I was doing my second year at college, my
         | professor was cool enough to let me submit an animation of the
         | self-balancing insertion algorithm for AVL trees. Those were
         | the years of Macromedia Flash and Director. It was a cool
         | project, and I wish I had kept the files. Overall, it was a
         | highly technical thing.
         | 
         | Twenty and so years later, I still do animations, even if only
         | as a hobby. These days I use Blender, Houdini, and my own
         | Python scripts and node systems, and my purpose is purely
         | artistic. Something that is as true today as it was twenty
         | years ago is that computer animation remains highly technical.
         | If an artist wants to animate some dude moving around, they
         | will need to understand coordinate systems, rotations, directed
         | acyclic graphs and things like that. Plus a big bunch of
         | specific DCC concepts and idiosyncrasies. The trade is such
         | that one may end up having to implement their own computational
         | geometry algorithms. Those in turn require a good understanding
         | of general data structures and algorithms, and of floating
         | point math and when to upgrade it or ditch it and switch to
         | exact fractions. Topology too becomes a tool for certain needs;
         | for example, one may want to animate the surface of a lake and
         | find out that a mapping from 3D to 2D and back is a very handy
         | tool[^1].
         | 
         | I daresay that creating a Word or even a Latex document with
         | some (or a lot of) formulas remains easier. But if I were the
         | director of a school and a student expressed that videos are
         | easier to understand, I would use it as an excuse to force
         | everybody to learn the computer animation craft.
         | 
         | [^1]: Of course it's also possible to do animations by simply
         | drawing everything by hand in two dimensions, but that requires
         | its own set of skills and talent, and it is extremely labor-
         | intensive. It's also possible to use AI, but getting AI to
         | create a good, coherent and consistent animation is still an
         | open problem.
        
         | jltsiren wrote:
         | If you need to visualize an algorithm in a talk, the usual
         | approach is having a few slides representing the key steps
         | instead of an actual animation. That way you can adapt the pace
         | to the audience, stop to answer questions about any individual
         | frame, and jump back to previous frames when necessary. People
         | often find animations on slides distracting, and the forced
         | pace is almost certainly wrong. And if the animation is longer
         | than a few seconds, the talk stops being a talk and becomes an
         | awkward video presentation instead.
        
           | klysm wrote:
           | > People often find animations on slides distracting, and the
           | forced pace is almost certainly wrong.
           | 
           | I completely disagree. Animations can be appropriate, but
           | people have formed dogmatic generalizations due to shitty use
           | of gifs
        
       | leoc wrote:
       | Eh, it's charming but honestly, for someone who doesn't already
       | know the maths it's still just edutainment, as it leaps from
       | trivial to incomprehensible in the blink of an eye.
        
         | EdwardCoffin wrote:
         | I don't think he's trying to make people understand the proof,
         | rather to show them that topology really has an application for
         | problems that aren't themselves topological in nature, and it
         | is comprehensible enough for that purpose.
        
         | throwaway98797 wrote:
         | useful to smooth brains like me
         | 
         | also meta lesson on how useful extra dimensions can be
        
           | ykonstant wrote:
           | This comment made me wonder if there is an analogous
           | "inscribed cube" problem in three dimensions which is easier
           | for smooth closed surfaces (>=V<=)
        
         | mettamage wrote:
         | I disagree, I'm not well-versed in math but I felt I could
         | follow most of it.
         | 
         | What I don't get though is the jump from the mobius strip to
         | the klein bottle.
         | 
         | He just goes and does it and duplicates the surface to reflect
         | it to the original one. I do understand to some extent that
         | once you have to assume the klein bottle is the shape you're
         | looking for that because it's self intersecting, it must mean
         | that you have 2 different points on that same surface and
         | therefore 2 lines of equal length with the same midpoint.
        
           | scrollaway wrote:
           | The point of the jump is that if you want to track an extra
           | coordinate and visualize it with the restrictions he
           | mentions, then the klein bottle is the correct topology (the
           | correct "visualization").
        
             | mettamage wrote:
             | Oh, so you mean to say that:
             | 
             | 1. The positive surface is for tracking one midpoint for
             | coordinates A and B
             | 
             | 2. The negative surface is for tracking another midpoint
             | for coordinates C and D
             | 
             | Together it's a klein bottle. Klein bottle's always
             | intersect, so therefore there's always an intersection of
             | the two midpoints, which is why there's a set of points A,
             | B, C and D such that line segments A and B are equally long
             | as C and D going through the same midpoint.
        
               | level3 wrote:
               | The "positive" surface already contains all the necessary
               | points. It's hard to prove that this surface on its own
               | intersects with itself, but turning it into a Klein
               | bottle makes the proof easy, since it's already known
               | that the Klein bottle must intersect with itself when
               | embedded in 3-D space.
               | 
               | It takes some rigor to ensure that mirroring the surface
               | and turning it into a Klein bottle doesn't introduce a
               | problem that would invalidate the proof, but the idea is
               | this:
               | 
               | 1) The surface exists only in the "positive" area above
               | the x-y plane, and the mirror exists only in the
               | "negative" area below the x-y plane.
               | 
               | 2) The two surfaces only share the points on the original
               | curve (on the x-y plane), and these points correspond
               | only to the trivial cases where A=B. The surface and its
               | mirror don't intersect anywhere else.
               | 
               | 3) The resulting combined surface is a Klein bottle in
               | 3-D space, which must intersect somewhere. Because of 2),
               | that intersection must either be in the positive space or
               | the negative space. Either way, that means there is an
               | intersection in the original surface.
               | 
               | As briefly mentioned in the video, it's critical that the
               | original constructed surface is only in the positive
               | area, because otherwise when you mirror it and then turn
               | it into a Klein bottle, the required intersection might
               | just be the surface intersecting with the mirror, and not
               | within the original surface itself.
        
           | pfdietz wrote:
           | The surface with the interior of the loop added forms
           | something called a projective plane. A Klein bottle is just
           | two projective planes glued together. Neither can be embedded
           | in R^3 without intersections.
        
         | sizzzzlerz wrote:
         | In many ways, I agree. I have an engineer's understanding of
         | math for my discipline but topology is most definitely not one
         | of them. Through his graphics, I could most follow the gist of
         | what he was attempting to get across but when it was over, I
         | honestly had to ask my self, what did I just watch. Perhaps
         | watching it again, really concentrating on it, and trying to
         | understand, might help, but, in reality, it is so far out of my
         | interest zone, I'll never do it.
        
         | wholinator2 wrote:
         | Well that's the "edu" part of edutainment. Sometimes you've
         | gotta rewind or pause and think about what's being said to make
         | sense of it. I do understand that sometimes videos go way too
         | fast and leave tons of stuff out and that's very frustrating
         | but 3b1b is a pillar of the community for very careful and
         | complete descriptions of things. But then also the "tainment"
         | part would signal that there's no need to watch if you're not
         | interested.
         | 
         | But all this could be my bias of having some math background,
         | though never having studied topology or even analysis from
         | anything like a class or textbook. Felt like the video was
         | aimed directly at people like me
        
       | CT4u8798 wrote:
       | I have no clue about maths beyond extremely basic stuff, but am
       | fascinated by this sort of thing, and I need pictures to
       | understand stuff like this. What an excellent video. During it,
       | when they introduced how you can map the 2D to 3 dimensions, my
       | initial thought was "I wonder if this is how you could map 3D
       | into the 4th dimension?". Then later they mentioned 4 dimensions.
       | This is something I cannot visualise or really understand.
        
         | chrsw wrote:
         | I gave up on trying to visualize 4 dimensions. I don't know if
         | it's possible. Instead I just try to think of 4D as more of
         | ideas and less geometry: rules, consequences, capabilities,
         | etc. We can do the same thing in 3 dimensions by saying things
         | like "two objects can't exist at the same place and at the same
         | time" or "parallel lines meet at infinity" or "parallel lines
         | never meet" or something. We usually don't do that for 3
         | dimensions because we have visualizations and intuitions which
         | we can use instead of breaking everything down formally all the
         | time.
        
           | whatshisface wrote:
           | Time is nature's forth dimension, so I think considering the
           | various stages of a slice moving through a four dimensional
           | object at once counts as a visualization.
        
             | CT4u8798 wrote:
             | Donnie Darko style.
        
             | philipov wrote:
             | Time is not a dimension of the same kind as spatial
             | dimensions. It has a different metric and you can't move
             | freely back and forth on it. When you rotate on the XT
             | plane, it doesn't mean the same thing as rotating on the XY
             | plane. It is not a good candidate for the sort of fourth
             | dimension we're interested in.
        
               | whatshisface wrote:
               | The Euclidian group in four dimensions is _a_ fourth
               | dimension, but the Lorentz /Poincare group is _the_
               | fourth dimension. ;)
        
               | gf000 wrote:
               | My understanding is that time can _be_ a 4th dimension,
               | but n-dimensional spaces themselves are simply a very
               | basic mathematical structure, where a point can be
               | described by n numbers (you can actually be abstract even
               | in that, no need to stick to rational numbers, I
               | believe).
               | 
               | As long as you can map time to a number line, it's a
               | valid representation. We just happen to have hardware
               | acceleration for 3-dimensions, and the 4th is just
               | completely unintuitive to us.
        
           | BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
           | There's a video from the same channel on visualizing
           | quaternions as a projection into 3d that was really fun for
           | this. Only a restricted section of a 4d space, but i feel
           | like the principle generalizes a little because of the idea
           | of, like, imagining one 3d space thats finite as equivalent
           | to an infinite 3d space, just stretched
        
           | everydayDonut wrote:
           | I've always wanted to make a 4d space in VR. That way it's
           | only one dimension higher, technically. Could help to
           | visualize it in a way that hasn't been done yet
        
             | rafabulsing wrote:
             | There's a 4D mini golf VR game you might be interested in
             | checking out. It's called, uh, 4D Golf. Creative! I've not
             | played it myself, but it's on my list. I hear it's pretty
             | cool!
        
         | klysm wrote:
         | > I have no clue about maths beyond extremely basic stuff, but
         | am fascinated by this sort of thing, and I need pictures to
         | understand stuff like this.
         | 
         | Fascination is all you need. I find many people have a lot of
         | self-limiting beliefs around math. There's many reasons for
         | them to develop, but I firmly believe that many people are
         | legitimately interested in mathematics and have the capability
         | despite their beliefs.
        
           | chrsw wrote:
           | One of the problems with math, like a lot of things, is that
           | even though you may find it deeply interesting and
           | fascinating and you may even see great utility in it,
           | becoming an expert is very difficult and is fraught with a
           | lot of failure which many people can't, or won't, stomach.
        
             | gf000 wrote:
             | I guess that's true for most things. Say, learning to play
             | an instrument can be similarly difficult at first.
             | 
             | Motivation is vaning, you need discipline to actually stick
             | to something and get better at it. But even getting better
             | day-by-day by only a tiny percentage will result in huge
             | gains over long periods.
        
       | bddg22 wrote:
       | Haha great to see him mentioned: Lobb taught my Linear Algebra 1
       | course a few (god im old) years ago. Excellent prof, and we still
       | laugh over the looks of despair he gave us when we didn't get
       | something.
        
       | jebarker wrote:
       | I loved this. I did my PhD in algebraic topology, but studied
       | lots of topology so was familiar with this material. I doubt I
       | could ever have explained these concepts so clearly or tied the
       | esoteric world of topology to a "practical" problem.
       | 
       | Since my PhD I've had a couple of careers and ended up as a
       | research software engineer working on AI. I often feel nostalgic
       | about pure math (maybe even a little regretful I left academic
       | math). But I think it'd be almost impossible for me to return to
       | academic math. The 3B1B videos always remind me that math is
       | available to all and you don't have to be a working mathematician
       | to enjoy, learn, and even discover, new math. You don't have to
       | be employed as a mathematician in a university.
        
         | noqc wrote:
         | The original understanding of a manifold was simply a
         | "configuration space", which is very concrete, so I'm not sure
         | what you mean that you are surprised that the world of topology
         | could be practical.
        
           | jebarker wrote:
           | I didn't say I'm surprised the world of topology could be
           | practical. I said that _I_ wouldn't have been able to explain
           | the concepts in the video so clearly and tie them to a
           | practical problem.
        
             | noqc wrote:
             | you actually said "I don't think I could have tied the
             | esoteric word of topology to a practical problem".
        
         | blueredmodern wrote:
         | Is there some area of math that you consider particularly
         | useful for software developers?
        
           | jebarker wrote:
           | Depending on the area of software development then
           | trigonometry, geometry, linear algebra, number theory,
           | combinatorics and probability theory are the most obviously
           | useful. Beyond that I know that there's a close relationship
           | between category theory and functional programming. I'm not
           | familiar with the details of that or whether it's useful in
           | practice or more of an area of theoretical study. I'm sure
           | there's others on HN that know though. Interestingly I used a
           | fair amount of category theory in algebraic topology, but
           | never closed the loop and learned much about the relationship
           | to programming.
        
         | pfdietz wrote:
         | > working on AI
         | 
         | I think we're about to enter an incredible new age of
         | mathematics, driven by AI and theorem provers. It's going to be
         | hugely disruptive to mathematics, but lots of fun to amateur
         | mathematicians.
        
           | jebarker wrote:
           | Yeah, I really hope so. I'm hoping that my background is
           | going to allow me to work/play in this area. I'm currently
           | learning about theorem provers so I can get involved.
        
             | vismit2000 wrote:
             | Recently on HN:
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42440016
             | 
             | Maybe this can aid in your learning.
        
               | jebarker wrote:
               | This is great - thanks for sharing
        
         | vhxs wrote:
         | I agree. My PhD is technically in CS but it made heavy use of
         | algebraic topology. Being 5 years out, having worked briefly in
         | tech, then at a national lab as a software engineer has given
         | me enough outsiders' perspective on pure math. You probably
         | need to work as a professional mathematician to be at the
         | research frontier of a given area, but otherwise the
         | fundamentals of math are unchanging, and in my opinion, that
         | makes it accessible to anyone who is sufficiently interested in
         | and passionate about math.
        
         | rvense wrote:
         | When I was doing my degree (area studies and linguistics), a
         | friend who was in mathematics liked to tell me that mathematics
         | was the second-most democratic science: all you need is a pen,
         | some paper, and a waste paper basket; the humanities were the
         | only thing that was more accessible - since we don't even need
         | the waster paper basket...
         | 
         | (I also miss my old subjects, not to mention being young and in
         | university)
        
       | WhitneyLand wrote:
       | Does anyone else feel anxiety watching this? I guess some fear of
       | failure/over achiever residual worry hangs on.
        
         | klysm wrote:
         | Anxiety about not understanding immediately?
        
           | WhitneyLand wrote:
           | Yeah, weird right? It's related to what's sometimes called
           | gifted kid burnout.
        
             | klysm wrote:
             | Yeah I can relate, high expectations result in
             | disappointment eventually
        
         | boothby wrote:
         | We generally don't talk about downvotes... but I gotta say that
         | it's sad that this comment was gray. Your approach to an
         | uncomfortable feeling was to name it, and get curious. That's
         | commendable, and you're brave to share such in public. We
         | shouldn't be punishing that here. Curiosity, like the response
         | of klysm, is warranted.
         | 
         | I've got a PhD in math and I've largely retreated from the
         | academic pursuit. The thing that got me through my degree
         | wasn't a drive for success or academic attainment, but love of
         | the journey. Once I found employment, math turned dark and
         | scary to me for quite some time, and this video was a breath of
         | fresh air.
         | 
         | I hope you find a source of joy that you can apply yourself to.
         | From such a root, you can flourish. It needn't be work, in
         | fact, I believe that the perilous job market underlies my
         | anxiety. My root is my chosen family, not my career. With that
         | security, it's easier to let one's mind wander and pursue
         | puzzles like this open problem (should they capture you). But
         | it starts with curiosity.
         | 
         | Once, at a conference, John H. Conway admitted to me that he
         | felt the very same as you for a period early in his career.
         | 
         | And speaking of failure: I woke up with an idea for how to
         | approach the open problem. I hacked up some code to apply my
         | approach to the Koch snowflake. In writing it out, I found the
         | obvious problem with my approach (context-free punchline:
         | spotted the division by zero before I wrote down the line of
         | code that would have triggered it). It was fun to fail, because
         | nothing depended on me succeeding in that effort. And spotting
         | bugs before they're written is always satisfying.
        
           | WhitneyLand wrote:
           | Thanks so much for the thoughtful comment. I hope others find
           | it as hopeful and motivating as I did.
        
       | madihaa wrote:
       | This video has now taught me what topology is.
        
       | klysm wrote:
       | 3b1b shows us what's possible in math pedagogy. I'm excited for
       | the future of the space, but sad it will take so long to adopt
       | methods like this for teaching math
        
         | shagie wrote:
         | The amount of effort to do a single 30 minute video of this
         | sort when scaled out to a half or full year math class is
         | significant.
         | 
         | Another consideration is that we learn things from it because
         | we want to learn it. We are engaged with the topic the instant
         | we hit play _because_ we want to watch it.
         | 
         | Compare that with a high school or college setting where the
         | majority of the class is taking it because they have to - not
         | because they want to. This means that there's no initial
         | engagement and a professor can't call out the student in the
         | 3rd row from the back that is starting to fall asleep.
         | 
         | This can work really well for the people who want to learn it.
         | However, it potentially adds to people who don't want to become
         | competent in the material falling further behind.
        
           | klysm wrote:
           | I agree you can't get around people fundamentally not being
           | interested in the material. That being said, I still think
           | that the power of 3b1b does should not be understated. It can
           | cultivate interest as well!
        
           | FLT8 wrote:
           | > The amount of effort to do a single 30 minute video of this
           | sort when scaled out to a half or full year math class is
           | significant.
           | 
           | This is true if Grant is the only person doing the work,
           | however having a well educated and scientifically engaged
           | populace seems important enough that we (the human race)
           | should devote a few more resources to creating high quality
           | (and freely available) courseware for all curricula/year
           | levels.
        
           | ninetyninenine wrote:
           | I've had classes where I didn't want to learn shit but I
           | learned anyway because of videos like this. Like the
           | explanation is so clear that as long as you don't fall asleep
           | you absorb it.
           | 
           | I didn't become interested in science and math until later in
           | my life and I spent much of my childhood in classes where I
           | didn't care.
        
           | wruza wrote:
           | I usually watch 3b1b without any prior "want to" or any idea
           | what it will be about. For me it's the format that drives
           | interest.
           | 
           | Although I'm from a natural-math-guy group, in a sense that I
           | usually have no issues with understanding the material, in
           | contrast to these "so interesting, but I understand nothing"
           | comments below it. I always wonder why they watch it, cause
           | it must be just a set of vector animations then.
        
           | gf000 wrote:
           | High school math has a standardized curriculum that doesn't
           | change significantly - it's 100% possible to create this high
           | quality material for the whole n years and make use of it
           | year after year. Especially that the most important part of
           | this is the software used to make these semi-interactive
           | graphics (which is open-source), so a teacher can just do it
           | their own way, incorporating animations fit for their
           | examples - no need to pre-render a video for each day. Do a
           | "normal" class and visualize important aspects.
        
         | wbl wrote:
         | There is no royal road to geometry just like the route to
         | Carnegie Hall is practice practice practice.
        
         | Enginerrrd wrote:
         | Yes and no...
         | 
         | Ultimately it would be impossible to come up with these greatly
         | simplified explanations without the complexities and notation
         | taught in the pedagogy you are dismissing.
         | 
         | Granted though, as students, the gifted ones often already have
         | this picture in their mind, so the intuition is obvious. So to
         | bring those less gifted or familiar with a topic up to speed,
         | things like this make a ton of sense.
        
       | gcanyon wrote:
       | I've known about the mobius strip since I was a kid, and the idea
       | of existence proofs based on continuous functions having to cross
       | since my early teens.
       | 
       | The idea that the mobiu strip is more than a pointless novelty
       | has never occurred to me, and now I feel like I have to apologize
       | to that object for dismissing it so cavalierly. Its role in this
       | proof is remarkable and a wonderful brain tickle.
        
         | edanm wrote:
         | If you haven't seen Dr Tadashi Tokieda's lectures on geometry,
         | I highly encourage you to watch at least the first one. The
         | best introduction to any math topic I've ever seen, I think,
         | based around (among other things) the Mobius strip.
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXHHvoaSctc&list=PLTBqohhFNB...
        
       | graycat wrote:
       | Another view of _topology_ is in
       | 
       | John L.\ Kelley, {\it General Topology,\/} D.\ Van Nostrand,
       | Princeton, 1955.\ \
       | 
       | In the set R of the real numbers and x, y in R with x < y,
       | 
       | (x,y) = { z | x < z < y }
       | 
       | is _open_ and, with x  <= y,
       | 
       | [x,y] = { z | x <= z <= y }
       | 
       | is _closed_.
       | 
       | A subset of R that is both closed and _bounded_ is _compact_ , a
       | powerful property, e.g., in Riemann integration.
       | 
       | And so forth but in _topological_ spaces much more general than
       | the real line and open and closed intervals. Apparently hence the
       | "General" in the book.
       | 
       | As a math major senior in college, read Kelley and gave lectures
       | to a prof. But now there are some other definitions of
       | _topology_.
        
       | devil12gamer1 wrote:
       | Love you
        
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