[HN Gopher] Math Machine - A notebook will show your kid how far...
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Math Machine - A notebook will show your kid how far they have
travelled
Author : sebg
Score : 19 points
Date : 2025-05-06 09:29 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (kidswholovemath.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kidswholovemath.substack.com)
| urda wrote:
| I LOVE physical notebooks, paper, and ink. Physical notebooks do
| not crash, they do not lock up, they do not have DRM on them,
| they are not impacted by "updates" to pens or inks. Sure they can
| be difficult to "backup" and can be lost, but these are small
| cons against the much larger pros.
|
| From math, to science, to world building, and even to learning a
| notebook can be your best friend. A quote that has always stuck
| with me about notebooks has been from Robert M. Pirsig's "Zen and
| the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance":
|
| > "For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written
| down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are,
| where you've been, where you're going and where you want to get.
| In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary
| because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in
| them and confused and forget what you know and what you don't
| know and have to give up."
| frainfreeze wrote:
| Related: https://wiki.c2.com/?LogBook and GreyPatter
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661167 (My productivity
| app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020))
| frainfreeze wrote:
| Seeing math on Lined Pages is unsettling to me. I agree with
| author that Blank Pages tend to become a mess, and that Gridded
| Pages are too "noisy", that's why Dotted pages are perfect and
| prefered for Journals, especially ones with very light dots. I
| wonder why I don't see more of those in math.
| jskherman wrote:
| Yeah, I also found dotted notebooks to be the sweet spot. It's
| cleaner than a lined or gridded notebooks and especially
| helpful if they're already numbered.
|
| The tweaks they found in the article is basically a proto-
| version of the Bullet Journal but just with its index system.
|
| Physical notebooks are nice but as I have to come to know
| throughout the years, they are also kind of "disposable" and
| cannot survive long-term if you have to do any amount of
| moving. You wish you could keep all of your journals/notebooks
| in an archive but seems infeasible when you don't have your own
| house or your house is just too small. The rising rent and
| house prices just makes this all the worse.
| yallpendantools wrote:
| I've had similar ideas throughout the years of my personal
| mathematical journey:
|
| - When I took my Discrete Mathematics course, I began to keep a
| separate notebook to compile proofs that I found to be
| particularly clever or, I thought, illustrated a particular
| concept/approach clearly. It was partially inspired by Erdos'
| concept of The Book.
|
| - I did something similar for "Leetcode" problems but in this
| notebook I would only document solutions I personally came up
| with for when I feel like having solved the problem gave me
| considerable "XP" if not outright leveling me up. They ended up
| mostly dynamic programming problems and clever applications of
| number theory---I never really felt like I grokked these topics
| even now so it was useful when I detected similarities to past
| problems.
|
| - Lately I've decided to give signal processing a deeper shot and
| a grid notebook has been my invaluable companion for the task.
| The last two notebooks were very neatly organized but this one is
| more like lab/field notes but for mathematics. It's gritty and
| dirty in there. There isn't really much point learning signal
| processing only from books so I'm always in front of my computer
| (with a lecture video or an interactive Python script) when I'm
| working on this notebook. Being able to formulate
| hypotheses/intuition, writing down thoughts to be considered
| later, annotating graphs/proofs where things don't make sense to
| me yet---it has been an extremely liberating learning experience.
| I've only been on this endeavor for a few weeks but I can
| definitely say it has allowed me to interact with the material at
| a deeper level.
|
| The only way my signal processing effort could be better was if I
| had a teacher whom I can ask my noted-down questions to. I know
| the suggestion is gonna come up and I'll be lying if I say it
| hasn't crossed my mind so I'm just gonna address it unprompted
| (pun intended): I don't bring my questions to a LLM because I'm
| not yet smart enough to detect bullshit in this field of study. I
| don't think setting-up my own agent to ingest my notes would make
| any sense because then I would have to structure my notes and the
| core reason why it's been so liberating/has enabled me to
| interact deeper with the material is because I gave myself the
| freedom to be unstructured.
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