Summer of Math Exposition

I’m having a bit of a hard time voting for this one. I personally don’t really care about “Hey look at this pretty thing”, but that’s entirely what the blog is about, so I need to take this into account when voting. I guess my main point of criticism that can’t (I think) be tainted by personal preference is that I felt like there was a bit too much symbol pushing without much thought for what is actually going on.

This one worked backwards, instead of showing a good visualisation for a problem, it constructed it own visual of the problem and made 3 fold fusilli! Although, this entry was nearing my level of knowledge, I was still just barely able to keep up with the concepts on hand. Well done.

I think it was a pleasant reading until here:

The picture of the square root is to take the whole complex plane, and map it to the right half-plane…

I had to pause and think thoroughly here, yeah I guess it’s clear, but it seemed much better to include a visual help for that.

At the start you mention this on principal branch:

The problem with it is that there’s some rushed discussion on choosing a principal branch…

The next time you use this term goes like this:

The strategy for choosing the multiple values is: take a principal branch…

Maybe I should already know what a principal branch is but by your tone at the start I thought you would explain that slowlier. By this point I started losing interest in the post because I was being introduced things I couldn’t completely follow and the topic wasn’t particularly interesting for me.

That said, I like your casual writing style for the most part.