from Hacker News

Penrose: From mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams

by amazing_stories on 6/2/20, 5:14 AM with 19 comments

• by stared on 6/2/20, 1:29 PM

  In this line - I enjoyed playing Euclidea (https://www.euclidea.xyz/) a minimalistic game on Euclidean geometry. The specification of geometry looks similar to the one from the game.

  ...

  Side note: when I hear "Penrose diagrams" I have in mind Penrose tensor notation, as in https://www.math3ma.com/blog/matrices-as-tensor-network-diag....

• by nsajko on 6/2/20, 1:35 PM

  The Byrne they mention is Oliver Byrne, who made a book of Elements of Euclid including colored graphics for the geometry.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Byrne_(mathematician)

  Archive.org, print: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628606

  In TeX: https://github.com/jemmybutton/byrne-euclid

• by Xophmeister on 6/2/20, 1:26 PM

  As a recovering mathematician, this fills me with joy. It would be great if it were implemented as, say, a LaTeX package, so the code to your diagrams could sit right in your documents (like how TikZ works). Still, either way, amazing work!

• by peter_d_sherman on 6/3/20, 6:35 AM

  This looks beautiful! And strange! And beautiful! Like the diagrams for an entire Calculus textbook could be created with it...(!)

  Penrose, for mathematical drawings, might very well become what TeX, LaTeX, and Desktop Publishing programs are, to text!

  I think you are on the right track to something grand!

  Wishing you a lot of luck in this endeavor!

• by mark_l_watson on 6/2/20, 1:04 PM

  It is ready for public use yet - I wish they had put that information sooner in the article.

  That said, looks cool and it is written in Haskell and React: https://github.com/penrose/penrose

• by 6gvONxR4sf7o on 6/2/20, 3:34 PM

  Stuff like this could be amazing for pedagogy. It’s automatically generating different ways of looking at a topic. I’m sure authors would love to include these different viewpoints were it not for the effort involved, so making it easy could be great!

• by Schiphol on 6/4/20, 7:51 AM

  A twitter thread by the first author of the paper: https://twitter.com/hypotext/status/1268218080993386497?s=20

• by 2sk21 on 6/2/20, 12:05 PM

  So this is written in Haskell - very impressive demo of the languages capabilities.

• by ThouYS on 6/4/20, 7:39 AM

  Oh how beautiful! Keenan Crane's papers by themselves are already a blessing. Now this, illustrations in his style? I'm drooling!

• by dunefox on 6/2/20, 11:52 AM

  That is a beautiful document!

• by layoutIfNeeded on 6/2/20, 1:51 PM

  Oh, I thought this was about the Penrose graphical notation for tensors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation