3blue1brownFingerprints from a Bookshelf
Audience:
Many STEM YouTubers recommend popular Math(s) books as a way to explore the ideas behind their videos in greater depth. But with so many excellent books available, where should you begin?
Recommendation engines help us discover music, films, and even sporting talent by quantifying the attributes of our favourites. Could we do the same with Math(s) books?
Inspired by the radar charts commonly used to compare modern athletes, this proof of concept gives each Math(s) book its own “fingerprint”, with each spoke corresponding to a broad mathematical topic.
Overlaying multiple fingerprints allows readers to compare books visually, identify complementary reads, or discover the surprising contrast in books with similar titles.
The current bookshelf contains just a small sample. But because it’s built in Desmos, anyone can duplicate the graph, edit it, and build their own mathematical library!
Analytics
Comments
what?
This is not necessarily a bad entry. However, I found that there wasn’t really anything too special about it.
It’s really just a case of listing books and then plotting what section of math they are about.
Thus, there is, in my opinion, a lack of novelty.
Nice idea and good effort. I found it very simple for this exposition though.
This is a really cool concept and is pretty well implemented (love that it’s open for people to contribute to!). Would be super useful as an educational tool! Gave it a lower score because I was expecting some “non-video” form of content that would explain a math concept with visualizations and/or text that would spark intuitive thinking.
Reading the title I was somehow expecting a whole story on how to detect fingerprints in a library and study their statistics to get books recommandations. Alas the linked page is completely different, more or less related to math but with no topic to dive in, no science feeling. I’m not even sure how to use that tool to find recommandations…