Comment

Comment by chriswarbo

Norman Wildberger takes this to the extreme with Rational Trigonometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Proportions:_Rational_T...

It eschews angles entirely, sticking to ratios. It avoids square roots by sticking to "quadrances" (squared distance; i.e. pythagoras/euclidean-distance without taking square roots).

I highly recommend Wildberger's extensive Youtube channels too https://www.youtube.com/@njwildberger and https://www.youtube.com/@WildEggmathematicscourses

He's quite contrarian, so I'd take his informal statements with a pinch of salt (e.g. that there's no such thing as Real numbers; the underlying argument is reasonable, but the grand statements lose all that nuance); but he ends up approaching many subjects from an interesting perspective, and presents lots of nice connections e.g. between projective geometry, linear algebra, etc.

parent chriswarbo 7 months ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton