Hello World

[Steven Wittens]

Let's give this a go.

Post your introductions, questions, demos, projects, ...

[Max Goldstein]

Alright, I'll bite.

Software developer, U.S. east coast, interested in visualization. My ideal job title might be "mathematical illustrator". Here's a thing I made, mostly with D3, but with MathBox at the end. Find me on twitter.

I'm just starting to coalesce all the essays, docs, and code samples (/examples/test/ is really helpful) into some mental model of what's going on.

[Steven Wittens]

I'll just chime in here too.

I'm a software dev from Vancouver, Canada (and sometimes Belgium), officially I'm an electrical engineer who studied signal processing. Lots of fun mathematics in there.

I'm interested in "clarifying the view". My own experience is that watching gorgeous mathematics is enlightening beyond mere beauty and art, and I see MathBox as a way to explore how this can be deployed for educational and cultural effect.

Random factoid: I first did the music-visualizer-in-a-music-visualizer almost 10 years ago, it still sits on my deviantart page:

http://unconed.deviantart.com/art/Turing-s-Carpet-22414742

ShaderGraph 2 came out of my desire to rebuild Winamp AVS for GPU, basically. I just took a detour into math visualization. So you have Justin Frankel and the other Nullsoft chaps to thank :).

[Matthew Kaemmerer]

Software developer in Austin, Texas.

I studied computer science in college, and crammed as many graphics courses as I could into my schedule. Since then, I got into web development and design. I'm quite pleased that two worlds are converging with the rise of WebGL. It's great because I get to reunite with my old friends linear algebra and projective geometry, and also because it gives me a leg up on other web developers who don't have a background in math and computer graphics.

I'm also a math hobbyist. I love learning about new new topics, and find that visualization and writing code are the most powerful tools I have to really grok a concept.

[James Crook]

Software developer in Dublin Ireland,

Long involved in Open Source, with Audacity sound editor.  The main issues there aren't technical but are about collaboration between people.  Worked in signal processing for an electronics company.  Now looking at how to make deep maths fun / beautiful / understandable / intuitive for more people, through maths of sound, which is how I found acko.net and mathbox.  

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[Jaak Randmets]

Hello,

PhD student and junior researcher, Estonia. Professionally I'm working on programming languages with a touch of crypto. By education I guess I'm a formal methods and programming languages guy.

I used be involved with the AVS community and the desire to do something with audio visualization still lives in me. Unlike some others here I'm not too interested in visualizing the maths that I work with but more interested in seeing (and hopefully making) pretty pictures (of either maths or just those that move to music). Currently I'm slowly working through mathbox and JS ecosystem (that I'm completely unfamiliar with) when I find the time.

- Jaak

[jdjd...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, October 4, 2015 at 9:27:29 AM UTC+15, Steven Wittens wrote:

Let's give this a go.

Post your introductions, questions, demos, projects, ...

Joseph Duchatelet

retired (since long) polytechnical, communications & acoustical envineer.

Trying to catch up with modern web languages & their graphical representations;

Mathbox certainly was an eye-catcher.

Hope to master it. Glad this group was started up.

One post "newbie help" is from "me"

[Blake La Pierre]

I graduated with a BS in Information and Computer Science in 2007. I moved to Connecticut immediately after and worked at a small software company for almost five years. A few months later, I worked a four month (one month researching/waiting for client; three months performing analysis for client) consulting job for a large financial corporation in Hartford.

I left that consulting firm about two-and-a-half years ago and now live in Berkeley, CA. In that time I've been developing many prototypes of systems that I think could be valuable tools. In the last year, my biggest focus has been on building the tool set required to launch and operate global overlay networks. While I have made decent progress there, I am not currently running any systems at that scale. However, for the last three to four months, I have shifted focus back to GUI concerns. Angular is good, but not good enough. React may be good enough, but I refuse to use `this` unless someone can show me that it is a necessary component.

So, that's where I'm kind of at, at the moment. I need to push code and data to *everyone*; the tools aren't quite right; and, I am still in the middle of "building my own" and "searching for the existing solution".

I've watched/read most (all?) of the main articles on acko.net. Some, multiple times. I've even recommended the article on Julia set fractals to a friend as a primer on complex numbers. I feel like the articles and other presentations have shown me something that I understand, but most of it is not something that I use in my everyday life, so it is difficult for me to test just how far that understanding extends. Please don't stop making more like them!

With MathBox^2, I'm thinking/working on a Craps simulator. So far I just have two, six-sided die (code only; no pretty graphics...yet) that can be roll()'d together. I then plot...I guess it's a histogram...for the outcome of each die, as well as for the sum of the two die that were rolled. I think it's pretty sweet, but it's trivial. I was recently with some friends who were considering visiting a casino and wanted to play craps; while they haven't understood my previous explanations of the game (I think I too quickly jumped into explaining that you can play multiple instances of the same basic game at the same time), I think I can do better. I started to derive the properties of the game starting with two discrete uniform random variables (represented as die faces) with a pen and a piece of paper. When I got to drawing the table to count the number of times each sum of the two die can be made, I was struck for a moment about how I had just drawn an approximation of a normal curve.

Ideally, I spend half a day and have a full-featured 3D-time-warping multiplayer craps game that literally breaks my credit union. I'm not at that level, yet.

I would like to, as smoothly as possible, show how the game of Craps works in terms of probability theory a la your previous demonstrations of mathematical concepts [although I'm willing to accept/expect better or worse :)]. So, as the outcome of the roll is determined, appropriate symbols animate around the screen to show how various things can be accounted for.

Again, ideally, I would like to be able to show any measurement that can be made about the game. For example, the derivation of the expected payoff of each bet should be shown. So far I have only derived the results for the Pass/Come bet, per time it's made (assuming it's never removed), but I want to also run simulations which will (hopefully) show that long term observations will appear to converge to those results.

I think there is a lot more that can be shown visually in a way that lends itself to easier comprehension of basic mathematical concepts and I'm not going to continue to try to explain it in text :(. I'm sure we have all used our imaginations before.

At some point, I'd guess we'd probably want entire suites on probability, statistics, etc (ie. every other mathematical topic).

I'll probably put a link up to what I've got (or maybe something slightly better) soon and it can be discussed more there. I'll most likely have some questions, there are already things I don't know how to do, but I'll wait until I can formulate them better.

[Steven Wittens]

 I think I can do better. I started to derive the properties of the game starting with two discrete uniform random variables (represented as die faces) with a pen and a piece of paper. When I got to drawing the table to count the number of times each sum of the two die can be made, I was struck for a moment about how I had just drawn an approximation of a normal curve.

Indeed, this is the connection between binomial series and discrete convolution. And beziers/b-splines and continuous convolution. Start with a uniform distribution, discrete or continuous, convolve it with another uniform distribution repeatedly. You will get a polynomial spline of increasing degree, i.e. a function made out of pieces of polynomials, continuous up to the n'th derivative. It converges on the normal distribution by virtue of the central limit theorem. 

It connects concepts used in probability, control systems theory, digital signal processing, differential/integral calculus and computer graphics... I've also wanted to do an article about this, but haven't figured out the right angle. But I too wanted to start by rolling dice and drawing the accumulated graphs.

[Blake La Pierre]

Indeed, this is the connection between binomial series and discrete convolution. And beziers/b-splines and continuous convolution. Start with a uniform distribution, discrete or continuous, convolve it with another uniform distribution repeatedly. You will get a polynomial spline of increasing degree, i.e. a function made out of pieces of polynomials, continuous up to the n'th derivative. It converges on the normal distribution by virtue of the central limit theorem. 

It connects concepts used in probability, control systems theory, digital signal processing, differential/integral calculus and computer graphics... I've also wanted to do an article about this, but haven't figured out the right angle. But I too wanted to start by rolling dice and drawing the accumulated graphs.

 

Yes, that gave me some picture in my head of what's going on. I'll be interested to see it visualized in MathBox.

I know many experimental scientists. One thing I would like to show is the calculation of p-values and other statistics for testing various hypotheses. Showing these in simulated random environments seems like it would be...uh, awesome. An interface to define simple hypotheses, collect data from real (or simulated) experiments [Sample experiments could be provided, or the more sophisticated user can enter their own hypothesis.], visualize the results, and provide various kinds of analysis (probably want to link these to more in-depth explanations of the concept) would be very interesting and would likely see lots of use.

What are your long term plans? Do you plan to build a systematic library of explanations, just demos, both, (other?)?

[Steven Wittens]

What are your long term plans? Do you plan to build a systematic library of explanations, just demos, both, (other?)?

I tend to write articles to formalize my own understanding. But between fractals, limits and animation math, I've pretty comprehensively covered my comfort zone. A lot of this is 15 years of on/off hobby coding condensed into superdense sessions. The only big topic missing is fourier transforms, but that's exactly why I needed Mathbox2 to be a capable sound/music visualizer too. Outside of that it would be excursions into relativity, differential geometry, quantum physics, computational chemistry, ... Those are topics other people would be a lot better at, and for which I have far less direct daily use.

Still I guess Mike Bostock has shown it's a good idea to make as many examples as you can come up with. 

Mostly I'm curious to see what other people do with it though.

[mcmc...@unca.edu]

I'm a Professor of Mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. I created my first webpage as a graduate student in 1993 and have continually tinkered with web technologies ever since. I started using Javascript when Google Maps first came out. More recently, I've been using D3 to create demonstrations for my Calculus classes. You can see just a few of these by poking around on my website here:
http://marksmath.org/

I have a lot of experience generating 3D visualizations with Mathematica but, even with our University site license, I find that students rarely look at those things outside of class. They seem much more inclined to look at stuff that just runs in their web browser. Thus, I've been looking for a while for a good web-based alternative. While I've played with three.js just a bit, it seemed bit more involved than I have had time to devote. My initial impressions indicate that mathbox does a reasonable job of bridging that gap.

Currently, I'm teaching Calculus II which led to a recent question on a solid of revolution demonstration. At some point, I'm sure I'll teach Calculus III at which point I'd probably jump into mathbox more heavily.

[Blake La Pierre]

Still I guess Mike Bostock has shown it's a good idea to make as many examples as you can come up with. 

I think tons of examples is a good idea. Providing some kind of logical groupings or orderings over them is even better. When you pair examples with an exceptional reference, then you start to have something very special. 

 

Mostly I'm curious to see what other people do with it though.

Same here. I'm still trying to wrap my head around some of these ideas, as well as find the time to put my thoughts into code.

[Blake La Pierre]

Is there a topic coming up in your class that could be a good target for a MathBox demo? Maybe we could work on one here that you could show to the class? Or maybe there is something that you could challenge the class to implement?

[David Raleigh]

I'm currently living in Belgium, but moving back to the west coast. I work as a software developer in the GIS field. I was looking for a mathy three.js library to write a blog article on GIS spatial relationships and that's how I found MathBox. I'm totally blown by the library and what you all are achieving with it. It reminds me of matplotlib and that makes me stoked for creating 3D graphs of data!

[martin.juhl...@gmail.com]

Hi there

I'm an electrical engineer with emphasis on robotics from Denmark. I have recently finished my PhD thesis and envisioned some more fancy/better way to carry my message across for my presentation/defense. I was looking into using a game engine like Unity, but after seeing the The Pixel Factory" presentation I'm convinced that MathBox would be easier and clearer.

Q: Is there any template or the like available for making a decent slideshow like you did with Pixel Factory, i.e. including pictures, video, etc? I would find i really helpful if you could guide or comment on the workflow for you to use it offline eg. compared to regular slides. I'm also thinking about stuff like how did you manage full screen mode vs. the slide comments that are on your webpage?

- Martin

[Yusuf Gören]

Hello,

I'm recent math Ph.D. graduate, working as an embedded system engineer in Washington, DC. On the side, I'm using JavaScript to develop web applets for online classes in my old campus. I started using MathBox v1 last year and was really happy with all the possibilities it offered in terms of visualization. I just started using v2, it was harder to adapt at the beginning with the intervals and arrays but now I got most of the basics.

Feel free to check the applets I developed (some of them still use MathBox v1, change the last number to something in [0-10] for the moment): 

http://people.ucsc.edu/~ygoren/math23sandbox/boxes/mathbox0.html

.

.

http://people.ucsc.edu/~ygoren/math23sandbox/boxes/mathbox10.html

Best,

Yusuf

[Steven Wittens]

There are many HTML/JS solutions for slideshows out there, my solution is homegrown and I doubt it would be accessible to people who don't have 10+ years of experience with web tech.

This is an area where I think others have to take the lead.

[pi]

Hello everyone!

Mainly I'm working on revamping representation of musical ideas (the whole thing is badly in need of rewrite), developing pitch training software (for Absolute Pitch, currently using JUCE: C++ multiplatform framework and IPython). I also teach maths if/when I find a good student.

I got into DSP from writing a pitch detection algorithm and I love it! Complex Analysis brought to life!  But it is so hard!

My goal is to understand the Laplace transform.

Actually my current goal is to understand MathBox2.  I'm really struggling!

π

PS Did you know there is an IRC channel: #mathbox on Freenode (webchat.freenode.net)?

π

[Alex Jordan]

Hello, I'm a mathematics instructor at Portland Community College. My day job involves teaching everything from basic algebra (solve x+1=3) to college sophomore level mathematics like calculus, differential equations, statistics, and linear algebra.

I'm also a software contributor to two open source software projects for math education. One is WeBWorK, the online homework platform. The other is MathBook XML, a system for publishing documents simultaneously in multiple output forms, including pdf, html, and epub. It's a small world, because I was at a WeBWorK coding camp where I met both Rob Beezer (the creator of MathBook XML) and Steven Wittens (the creator of MathBook).

I'm part of a team that is taking a mature OER for calculus, APEX Calculus, and converting it to MathBook XML so that new editions will exist in both print and ebook formats. We will simultaneoulsy give the book WeBWorK support. If you download the current APEX pdf from that link, and then open it with an Adobe viewer, there is an interesting feature in the 3D graphics that appear in the later chapters. They are static images at first, but clicking on them will activate a manipulable version where the camera can be repositioned. This is achieved by embedding 3D data in the form of a .prc file into the .pdf.

To migrate to MathBook XML and keep this feature, I think that the .prc data is not usable for the html version of the book. So I am looking at other options, including MathBox. I posted a question already probing the viability of MathBox for such a project. At first, I'd be interested in making versions of the existing APEX graphs. As time passed, the author and other contributors might be interested in using the more interesting features that MathBox offers.

[lam...@ciencias.unam.mx]

Alright, I'm a physics student, and I'm frustrated with the excessive formalism of the math we're taught. I'm more frustrated with the conspicuous absence of geometric interpretations for said abstract math.

I think mathbox is an amazing example of engineering, and I'm sure I can harness a little bit of its power to understand better and also to help others understand, but I'm struggling with the lack of documentation, and getting by just hacking at the examples (not a bad thing, but limited nontheless).

I've managed to create some simple animations of ruled surfaces, and some other simple examples.

Right now I'm stuck on trying to create animations like the ones Wittens uses in his presentations.

[Divisuals Net]

Hi,

Stumbled-upon Mathbox few years ago and have been a fan ever since (thanks Steven!).

Quick intros: I'm an engineer turned product guy based in SF Bay Area, and tinker with code in my free time :) Also, trying to get my kids interested by making math more visually appealing!

For starters, I'm trying to build from the latest codebase (0.0.6-dev) and refresh the build (gulp) tooling as well as move to the latest THREE (106.x). Here's the latest status:

- Shadergraph: updated to the latest; all tests passing

- Threestrap: updated to the latest; 2 tests skipped (TBD)

- Mathbox: updated to the latest; all tests passing, currently debugging runtime issues (examples)

Getting close so I can create a pull request if there's interest.

Cheers!

On Saturday, October 3, 2015 at 11:27:29 AM UTC-7, Steven Wittens wrote:

[lam...@ciencias.unam.mx]

I've made a little site to upload the mathbox hacks I've come up with.

https://kaosarchives.hashbase.io/

The website is available on the dat:// protocol.

You can access the demos through http, but the site won't work correctly, and you will have to manually browse through them in the mods/ folder.

some of my favorites are:

https://kaosarchives.hashbase.io/mods/cyclingColors.html

https://kaosarchives.hashbase.io/mods/conoLissajoux.html

https://kaosarchives.hashbase.io/mods/espacioFaseDeOndaExtendido.html  (meant to represent an oscillating string with the third dimension representing time)

https://kaosarchives.hashbase.io/mods/tiempoEspacioStanding.html (same as before, only now we have two waves with equal frequency, traveling in opposite direction, ie. a standing wave)

https://kaosarchives.hashbase.io/mods/luz.html  (simple representation of EM fields in a light wave)

https://kaosarchives.hashbase.io/mods/polarSurf2.html  (work in progress, goal is to represent complex functions with one dimension of the image encoded as height, the other as color)

https://kaosarchives.hashbase.io/mods/mobius.html (parametrization of mobius band, moving through time)

All constructive criticism, techniques or examples of code are very welcome.

[π]

Did you ever complete this work?

It would be a pity if the effort did not make it back to master.

I see that https://github.com/unconed/mathbox/commits/master has no commits since mid 2016.

I think it will be wonderful to see this framework continue to evolve.

π

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[π]

I recommend putting this up on GitHub (which will encourage refinements/contributions), and updating https://github.com/unconed/mathbox/blob/master/README.md by creating an "External Resources" section.

This section could then link it to any interesting / instructive MathBox code out there.

π

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