An Infinitely Large Napkin [pdf]

quirino 4 years ago |

Evan Chen is a very valuable person in the Math Olympiad scene.

The Geometry book [1] he wrote in high school is required reading for any serious competitor and I believe he is the main responsible for some bringing some techniques into the olympic meta, such as Barycentric Coordinates.

Also, his blog post [2] about writing is one of the best ones I've ever read.

[1] https://web.evanchen.cc/geombook.html [2] https://blog.evanchen.cc/2015/03/14/writing/

voidhorse 4 years ago | |

Seems like a really interesting person. Off topic, but his assertions that the majority of students are “conned” into thinking math is important is strange to me. Almost everyone I know always knew they’d never need to know the Pythagorean theorem for the vast majority of life’s obstacles—they weren’t tricked into thinking it was important, they learned it because as a kid you don’t have any power and are coerced to complete certain tests to make your way along a certain circumscribed educational track.

tuatoru 4 years ago | | |

The Pythagorean theorem is really useful for any construction. Builders use it regularly. More experienced DIYers also use it. Not a good example of rarely used schoolbook learning.

How about obscure stuff about hyperbolic trig functions (sinh, tanh and so on)?

voidhorse 4 years ago | | |

I actually just had to use some sin/cos the other day while programming some audio stuff so there ya go. Not so useless after all.

alanbernstein 4 years ago | | |

I remember telling a friend once in high school, that I was kind of happy to find a good real-world use for cubic polynomials. She asked what it was, so I started "well I was programming..." and she interrupted, "of course math is useful for programming, that doesn't count".

dezren39 4 years ago | |

thank you for this comment this turned my day around

dang 4 years ago |

A bit of past discussion:

An Infinitely Large Napkin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20168936 - June 2019 (32 comments)

An Infinitely Large Napkin [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467506 - Sept 2016 (3 comments)

mgradowski 4 years ago |

This book exposed me to proper math back in high school, I liked it.

jimmyvalmer 4 years ago |

Never heard the author, but having read his blog, I've concluded I am this guy modulo the talent and the fact that he got to my way of thinking in half the time.

Cauchy2022 4 years ago |

Off-topic: Mobile version only loads the title page of the book and leaves all remaining pages blank. I thought that was the joke.

tartakovsky 4 years ago | |

1. Not off topic. 2. Mobile version of what, it’s a pdf. 3. I can see the full text on my iPhone.

apollo1213 4 years ago | | |

You can read the PDF directly in browser: https://docmadeeasy.com/v/484772290

Cauchy2022 4 years ago | | |

Yea on my Android app, pages such as Twitter and pdf cannot be loaded and displayed properly, and I have to open browser to see the actual content.

joecool1029 4 years ago | | |

There's a way to work around this using Android firefox (or a fork) with Android pdf.js extension. Mozilla is making this hard by not blessing this extension even though it uses one of their own developed pieces of software.

For some reason Android app devs think it's perfectly normal to not be able to open pdf's in a browser tab.

Cauchy2022 4 years ago | | |

The Material app on Android. Loading pdf in app and it turns out that I can only see the first page followed by endless blank pages

hackerbrother 4 years ago | | |

Sounds like a bug with Material..

lupire 4 years ago | |

It's 900pages (but under 10MB on disk) so your app might have trouble getting it into memory.