Friday, 10 February 2017

Genius Hour Update #3

I am currently in the process of consolidating my research for the Genius Hour project. I believe my final product will take the form of a small textbook. One of the challenges I am facing has to do with making figures. The original figures in Euclid are very good but they can be difficult to interpret. Mathematician Oliver Byrne produced a very colourful edition of Euclid which I find intriguing but I don't think would be good for my purposes. I want to produce an exposition of Euclid, not just a new edition. One solution I have arrived at, following Byrne's approach somewhat, is to colour-code my figures. Black represents "givens". Blue represents constructed lines. Red represents constructed circles. Green represents constructed points. My figure from proposition 2 (duplication of a line) is shown below as an example:

Another possibility that I found in class today is to use a live screen capture. This would allow me to show a construction step-by-step without producing a cumbersome amount of images. Using Screencast-o-matic I produced a video showing the construction of an equilateral triangle. Although this couldn't be done for a book in the normal sense of the word, it would be very useful to produce a set of these (perhaps one for each construction) to be a companion to the book.





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