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Mathematical Comics: A Tour of Complex Analysis (sites.google.com)
30 points by ColinWright on July 15, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments


I like this idea, but the presentation is essentially a handwritten textbook, which is close to the worst of both worlds. Some interesting drawings would be more helpful, or at least more entertaining, than plain text that is difficult to read. (Sorry to be downer. I really wanted to like this.)


Mathematicians are like Chefs who can list ingredients perfectly, but can't explain how to cook the dish. They excel at stating what things are but fall short in teaching why and how things work.


I think this was just normal math exposition but presumably more labor intensive to produce. We get a sequence of generic graphical containers for blurbs of text (e.g. an image of an open booklet, a sign, a spiral-bound notebook), and speech bubbles from unnamed, featureless non-characters. As a comic, it's shallow and uncreative. There are some diagrams, but these would just as easily have been at home in any other didactic presentation. I think the only benefit the "comic" format gives is that it pressured the authors to be punchy, breaking the material into small chunks that fit into these graphical elements. That's good -- but the same small chunks could have been packaged in some other form just as easily.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-08-20


I also really wanted to like this, but I'd say it feels like I got a used textbook someone else doodled in all the margins of. My expectation was something more like Math Girls or The Manga Guides.


Was this generated by AI? It seems like a copy-paste of a math textbook into a the form of a comic (but without the substance of a comic).


I don't see any reason to think it's AI. The handwriting is consistent and everything is simple enough it would be easier to do it by hand.




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