Summer of Math Exposition

MaVS

With the MaVS (Modeling and Visualizing STEM) project that our team of 3 worked on this summer, we wanted to build a website with interactive visualizations of undergraduate-level math and computer science topics. We aimed our work this summer at a few simpler topics in these fields, namely sorting algorithms, simple encoding/compression methods, and number theory (particularly modular arithmetic). We would like for the website as a whole to be evaluated as our entry, but if a single "lesson" is required as the entry, I am specifically submitting the lesson on Huffman coding.

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7 Overall score*
31 Votes
12 Comments
Rank 1

Comments

The website and visualizations are clean, simple and effective. I noticed two links to select between lesson and visual. I liked that choice, as it gives your project two sides, one in learning and understanding the basics of a subject, and the other one to see and remember how an algorithm works.

5

Are you kidding? What a final prestige! Incredibly clear and memorable, with impressive interactivity.

9

just read the huffman encoding lesson, but it was super well explained and pretty neat! the visualizations were great

8.1

it should be said that we need to store the tree itself in the final calculation, otherwise I like the interactive elements

5.7

I don't know how, but it would be better if it would be longer. Perhaps add a takeaway at the end

4.8

I loved the Huffman coding lesson!!! Super interactive and makes it very easy to understand One suggestion I would have is at the end, have a comparison of the Huffman coding to other types of encoding other than just ASCII—it seemed to give ~50% reduction which is good, but I was wondering how that compared to other methods

8.3

The step by step images would be even more powerful if there were an animated transition, so that it was clear which components were moved in that step.

5.1

Explained from basics, drew the picture and then the explanation became obvious...bravo !

9

Interesting and appropriate

7.1

Well done website! I don't know anything about that, but it felt it was missing something. How to decode it? You need to know the encoding, so you need to store it somewhere? But anyway, good explanation overall!

7.1

This was a brisk yet marvelous treatment of Dr. Huffman's computing solutions. And it was a wonderful way to be reminded of Cantor's proof that the closed set of [0,1] on the set of Real numbers is uncountably infinite!

8.6

The article was very well written, and gave a semi-intuitive explanation for Huffman encoding, which was cool! I think it would've been slightly more interesting if you talked about some possible (maybe simpler) approaches to encoding systems first, and then gradually brought together the ideas for the Huffman encoding. However, I get that doesn't really suit the style you were going for with the articles. The simulations were really good as well!

7.1