I’m feeling very excited about this agenda. Is there currently a publicly-viewable version of the living textbook? Or any more formal writeup which I can include in my curriculum? (If not I’ll include this post, but I expect many people would appreciate a more polished writeup.)
If you’re looking for curriculum materials, I believe that the most useful reference would probably be my “Infra-exercises”, a sequence of posts containing all the math exercises you need to reinvent a good chunk of the theory yourself. Basically, it’s the textbook’s exercise section, and working through interesting math problems and proofs on one’s own has a much better learning feedback loop and retention of material than slogging through the old posts. The exercises are short on motivation and philosophy compared to the posts, though, much like how a functional analysis textbook takes for granted that you want to learn functional analysis and doesn’t bother motivating it.
The primary problem is that the exercises aren’t particularly calibrated in terms of difficulty, and in order for me to get useful feedback, someone has to actually work through all of them, so feedback has been a bit sparse. So I’m stuck in a situation where I keep having to link everyone to the infra-exercises over and over and it’d be really good to just get them out and publicly available, but if they’re as important as I think, then the best move is something like “release them one at a time and have a bunch of people work through them as a group” like the fixpoint exercises, instead of “just dump them all as public documents”.
I’ll ask around about speeding up the public—ation of the exercises and see what can be done there.
I’d strongly endorse linking this introduction even if the exercises are linked as well, because this introduction serves as the table of contents to all the other applicable posts.
I’m feeling very excited about this agenda. Is there currently a publicly-viewable version of the living textbook? Or any more formal writeup which I can include in my curriculum? (If not I’ll include this post, but I expect many people would appreciate a more polished writeup.)
If you’re looking for curriculum materials, I believe that the most useful reference would probably be my “Infra-exercises”, a sequence of posts containing all the math exercises you need to reinvent a good chunk of the theory yourself. Basically, it’s the textbook’s exercise section, and working through interesting math problems and proofs on one’s own has a much better learning feedback loop and retention of material than slogging through the old posts. The exercises are short on motivation and philosophy compared to the posts, though, much like how a functional analysis textbook takes for granted that you want to learn functional analysis and doesn’t bother motivating it.
The primary problem is that the exercises aren’t particularly calibrated in terms of difficulty, and in order for me to get useful feedback, someone has to actually work through all of them, so feedback has been a bit sparse. So I’m stuck in a situation where I keep having to link everyone to the infra-exercises over and over and it’d be really good to just get them out and publicly available, but if they’re as important as I think, then the best move is something like “release them one at a time and have a bunch of people work through them as a group” like the fixpoint exercises, instead of “just dump them all as public documents”.
I’ll ask around about speeding up the public—ation of the exercises and see what can be done there.
I’d strongly endorse linking this introduction even if the exercises are linked as well, because this introduction serves as the table of contents to all the other applicable posts.