Penrose: From mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams (opens in new tab)

(penrose.ink)

176 pointsamazing_stories6y ago19 comments

19 comments

18 comments · 11 top-level

Xophmeister6y ago· 4 in thread

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!

Myrmornis6y 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-nikolaev6y 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.

Xophmeister6y 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).

1 more reply

abdullahkhalids6y 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...

mark_l_watson6y ago· 2 in thread

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

sealjam6y ago

I assume you mean "it is not ready for public use yet"?

mark_l_watson6y ago

Yes, thanks.

2sk216y ago· 1 in thread

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

hbogert6y ago

You mean that it can create decent parsers?

stared6y 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....

nsajko6y 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

peter_d_sherman6y 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!

6gvONxR4sf7o6y 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!

Schiphol6y ago

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

ThouYS6y ago

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

dunefox6y ago

That is a beautiful document!

layoutIfNeeded6y ago

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

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse