octed

Unfortunately I still have a soft spot for beautiful writing. The "point" often sticks better when it is expressed eloquently. Having to think a little bit to get to the point also helps with absorbing it, at least in my experience.

This is the translation I was referring to in a previous comment! Interesting how it has been brought up twice in a single thread.

The author of the website has mentioned that

> I am slowly replacing the Cotton/Hazlitt translation with a contemporary one and adding new notes

So I would assume that the essay you're talking about is from the earlier Cotton translation and has still not been replaced.

This is the first time I've seen AI being used to "modernize" old texts, and it works wonderfully in this case; though a bit of the old-timey charm is lost imo. I used to read a translation that I'd found in my university library which I enjoyed a lot. Very readable but still retained the "feel" of a 16th century book. I don't recall the translator unfortunately.

HN has been surprisingly good today. Seen a couple of very high quality posts (at leasts posts that are to my liking), this one included. I thank OP for posting this.

The kinds of AP Calc kids you see must be super different from the ones I've seen then. I'm in a uni with a large amount of kids who've taken AP Calc and yet most of them struggled a lot with the first semester intro-to-proofs course. The second semester linear algebra course (it's a middle ground between a proof-based and a computational course) was even worse. I know many kids with 5's in AP Calc BC who resort to memorizing basic proofs (which is the sort of thing that helps with AP exams) instead of learning how to write one on their own, and some of the TA's have told me that the most common mistake on the midterm was incorrectly negating the statement "A is a subspace of B".

This is not to say that high schoolers can't do abstract algebra (or higher mathematics more generally). In senior year I attended a week-long camp (Arnold had a full semester) in my local uni where we proved the impossibility of squaring the circle, doubling the cube, etc using field extensions. And I was in the older side! Most of the kids there were 10th grades. Though Arnold's class was probably substantially harder than ours. I worked through V. B. Alekseev's book after the camp was over and the exercises were substantially harder than the ones we did at the camp. The material on Riemann surfaces was very hard to understand as well, much harder than the group theory part (I still don't understand Riemann surfaces lol).

In conclusion, AP Calc, and students' performance in it, is a terrible metric for assessing mathematical ability. Sorry for the long rant.

Do you know anywhere where one can look into dynamicland more deeply? I've been interested in playing around with it for a while (hopefully I can get my hands on a projector lol) but have never found any details. Omar Rizwan's website had a cool post on geokit but that was all I managed to find.

I've been wanting to add RSS to it for a while tbh but I've been consistently distracted by other things. Since classes are over I might get around to it eventually.

As for the pdf look, you're right. The problem I encountered way back when I was actually building the site was that I didn't know what to put on the extra margins. I could've put footnotes and figures, but that's pretty hard to do if you're generating the site from markdown without a custom markdown engine. I'll see what I can do about it tho, and if you have any suggestions for how I could improve this I'm all ears.