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Penrose: From mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams

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176 points by amazing_stories 6 years ago · 19 comments

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stared 6 years ago

In this line - I enjoyed playing Euclidea (https://www.euclidea.xyz/) a minimalistic game on Euclidean geometry. The specification of geometry looks similar to the one from the game.

...

Side note: when I hear "Penrose diagrams" I have in mind Penrose tensor notation, as in https://www.math3ma.com/blog/matrices-as-tensor-network-diag....

nsajko 6 years ago

The Byrne they mention is Oliver Byrne, who made a book of Elements of Euclid including colored graphics for the geometry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Byrne_(mathematician)

Archive.org, print: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628606

In TeX: https://github.com/jemmybutton/byrne-euclid

Xophmeister 6 years ago

As a recovering mathematician, this fills me with joy. It would be great if it were implemented as, say, a LaTeX package, so the code to your diagrams could sit right in your documents (like how TikZ works). Still, either way, amazing work!

  • Myrmornis 6 years ago

    It will be great to include Penrose diagrams in LaTeX documents. But Penrose is implemented in Haskell and I'm pretty sure no-one would want to see what it would look like were it implemented in TeX!

    • a-nikolaev 6 years ago

      I agree that rendering graphics as a separate file is fine. I think, if one wants to get better interoperability with TeX, they can try to make Penrose produce TikZ, which can be then embedded into the TeX document.

    • Xophmeister 6 years ago

      Oh sure, reimplementing in TeX would not be worth thinking about! I'm not familiar with exactly how TeX packages work, but I assumed they could call out to external tools that return the necessary (La)TeX commands (e.g., code syntax highlighters work like this, IIRC).

      • Myrmornis 6 years ago

        OK, I see. Sorry yes I agree what you're saying is sensible and what I said was silly.

        Yes, minted works like that -- it starts a python child process to use pygments to do the syntax highlighting. But with minted and TikZ there's a single element of "source code" in the LaTeX file (a code listing or tikz code fragment respectively) that maps to a single element in the output (syntax-highlighted code, or a TiKZ image). Whereas with Penrose, there would be multiple source code files (the style and substance code). I'm not sure it quite fits the native LaTeX model does it? Maybe it's better just to use Make to generate the Penrose diagram for inclusion via \includegraphics?

  • abdullahkhalids 6 years ago

    Yeah. That would be really nice. I think all that is needed is a wrapper package.

    https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/92691/is-it-possible...

peter_d_sherman 6 years ago

This looks beautiful! And strange! And beautiful! Like the diagrams for an entire Calculus textbook could be created with it...(!)

Penrose, for mathematical drawings, might very well become what TeX, LaTeX, and Desktop Publishing programs are, to text!

I think you are on the right track to something grand!

Wishing you a lot of luck in this endeavor!

mark_l_watson 6 years ago

It is ready for public use yet - I wish they had put that information sooner in the article.

That said, looks cool and it is written in Haskell and React: https://github.com/penrose/penrose

6gvONxR4sf7o 6 years ago

Stuff like this could be amazing for pedagogy. It’s automatically generating different ways of looking at a topic. I’m sure authors would love to include these different viewpoints were it not for the effort involved, so making it easy could be great!

Schiphol 6 years ago

A twitter thread by the first author of the paper: https://twitter.com/hypotext/status/1268218080993386497?s=20

2sk21 6 years ago

So this is written in Haskell - very impressive demo of the languages capabilities.

ThouYS 6 years ago

Oh how beautiful! Keenan Crane's papers by themselves are already a blessing. Now this, illustrations in his style? I'm drooling!

dunefox 6 years ago

That is a beautiful document!

layoutIfNeeded 6 years ago

Oh, I thought this was about the Penrose graphical notation for tensors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation

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