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Using Wikipedia for Mathematics Self-Study

11 pointsby vinchucoalmost 7 years ago

2 comments

teiloalmost 7 years ago
Wikipedia&#x27;s math content is, in a way, unique. I can read and comprehend almost any scientific topic there except math. And, it&#x27;s not like I am not capable of understanding. I am a highly abstract thinker, and have an intuitive understanding of many higher-mathematical concepts. I&#x27;m pretty decent at functional programming (hopefully that&#x27;s not too much of a non sequitur).<p>Here&#x27;s how this usually goes: I see a mathematical term in some article (for example, eigenvalue). Go to Wikipedia to learn what it means. Find five more terms that I don&#x27;t understand. Look those up. Eyes glaze over while scanning pages full of formulas that I also don&#x27;t understand. Pretty soon I forget what I was trying to understand, and I give up.<p>(The one exception, oddly enough, was set theory. For some reason that clicked. The axioms of the ZFC made perfect sense to me, and the symbolic representation, their conclusions, etc., just felt right. But I doubt that I could truly learn even that subject using just Wikipedia.)<p>Wikipedia is great as a reference, but when it comes to a subject so intensely technical as mathematics, the articles require too much context. They are a great reference to someone well-versed in the specific field of math the articles address, but are otherwise incomprehensible. This is not a criticism of Wikipedia. It&#x27;s just the nature of the subject.
vinchucoalmost 7 years ago
Are we getting closer to [0] instead of [1] ?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libraryofbabel.info" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libraryofbabel.info</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KvMxLpce3Xw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KvMxLpce3Xw</a>