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Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

teachyourselfmath.app

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Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#1

Post by viveknathani_ »

Good math problems are hidden inside textbooks and online documents. To keep up with all the sources in the world is hard. For someone who just wants to continuously solve problems, finding and going through all the sources feels like a hassle. I wished for a website that could just dump all the math problems available in the world out there. And if I could filter the problems by topics, that would be beautiful.

teachyourselfmath is a side project that was born out of this need. At its core, it is a math PDF extraction engine. The engine has some machine learning going on behind the scenes to extract math problems in LaTeX from any image or document.

A little bit about me: I am Vivek, a software engineer based out of India with a diverse set of interests including math. This project is close to my heart for many different reasons and nothing would make me happier than finding people on the internet who would find this website to be useful.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this. Thanks!

Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it
teachyourselfmath.app

Re: Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#3

Post by viveknathani_ »

fragmede wrote: post #2

This is great but those are some really hard questions! Some links to math textbooks to help figure out answers would be great.

I am working on exposing the difficulty for every problem. With a larger problem set and an ability to filter by difficulty, this problem can be solved I think.

One of the ideas that came up in feedback is that I could have an AI driven experience to walk a user through the question's topic and give enough pointers to eventually arrive at a solution. I am still thinking about the best way to approach this problem in general.

Thanks for the feedback!

Re: Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#4

Post by alexpetralia »

viveknathani_ wrote: post #3
fragmede wrote: post #2

This is great but those are some really hard questions! Some links to math textbooks to help figure out answers would be great.

I am working on exposing the difficulty for every problem. With a larger problem set and an ability to filter by difficulty, this problem can be solved I think. One of the ideas that came up in feedback is that I could have an AI driven experience to walk a user through the question's topic and give enough pointers to eventually arrive at a solution. I am still thinking about the best way to approach this problem in…

I actually did exactly this, plugging the questions into Google and seeing the step-by-step answer. I found this useful.

Re: Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#7

Post by viveknathani_ »

alexpetralia wrote: post #4
viveknathani_ wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am working on exposing the difficulty for every problem. With a larger problem set and an ability to filter by difficulty, this problem can be solved I think. One of the ideas that came up in feedback is that I could have an AI driven experience to walk a user through the question's topic and give enough pointers to eventually arrive at a solution. I am still thinking about the best way to approach this problem in…

I actually did exactly this, plugging the questions into Google and seeing the step-by-step answer. I found this useful.

thanks, this gives more conviction to the idea! also, what type of questions are you interested more in? there are many topics I could cover over time but I am looking to prioritize which ones to do first.

Re: Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#8

Post by ilikegreen »

Hello! Thanks for sharing. This seems like a great resource, and I love that it is open-sourced; I could find myself wanting to help develop this further, as I also have some appreciation for math, and also cherish the idea of having somewhere to find good exercises to tackle.

Not in the spirit of spoiling the fun or bring any unnecessary tension, I can't help asking: considering that these exercises are being scraped from .pdf sources, would you consider having the source for any given exercise? Of course, it brings problems of exposing possibly copyrighted material. I'm just wondering what your stance is on that.

Re: Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#9

Post by viveknathani_ »

ilikegreen wrote: post #8

Hello! Thanks for sharing. This seems like a great resource, and I love that it is open-sourced; I could find myself wanting to help develop this further, as I also have some appreciation for math, and also cherish the idea of having somewhere to find good exercises to tackle. Not in the spirit of spoiling the fun or bring any unnecessary tension, I can't help asking: considering that these exercises are being scrape…

> I could find myself wanting to help develop this further, as I also have some appreciation for math, and also cherish the idea of having somewhere to find good exercises to tackle.

Glad to hear this!

> Of course, it brings problems of exposing possibly copyrighted material. I'm just wondering what your stance is on that. Given that problems are anyway discussed on the internet in various forms, I wouldn’t see this as a copyright concern. And I intend to keep this list free. Aggregation shouldn’t be a problem, hopefully :)

Re: Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#10

Post by ilikegreen »

viveknathani_ wrote: post #9
ilikegreen wrote: post #8

Hello! Thanks for sharing. This seems like a great resource, and I love that it is open-sourced; I could find myself wanting to help develop this further, as I also have some appreciation for math, and also cherish the idea of having somewhere to find good exercises to tackle. Not in the spirit of spoiling the fun or bring any unnecessary tension, I can't help asking: considering that these exercises are being scrape…

> I could find myself wanting to help develop this further, as I also have some appreciation for math, and also cherish the idea of having somewhere to find good exercises to tackle. Glad to hear this! > Of course, it brings problems of exposing possibly copyrighted material. I'm just wondering what your stance is on that. Given that problems are anyway discussed on the internet in various forms, I wouldn’t see this…

I see. I still feel this must be carefully thought out, because although exercises are being discussed online, this platform could potentially outright distribute them all at once in a centralised manner. And it can be a source of tension, specially without attribution (I've grown a bit more sensitive to this issue after realising how much effort goes into producing good exercises, like Advent of Code for programmers).

I think there would be value in knowing a given exercise comes from chapter X of book Y; it might even help track knowledge dependencies, so to say (to solve exercise Z, student probably needs exposure to all chapters between X-3 and X). And it could also be possible to build thorough different levels of exercises in different areas: a set of basic computation exercises (invert this matrix; solve this simple integral) - and these exercises, as you probably know, can be generated easily; some intermediate exercises of theorem applications; and then groups of higher difficulty material (which are probably somewhat more creative exercises).

Anyway, this is really an inspiring project and I hope it brings you lots of joy! and, in case it helps anyone, I've found a good trove of mathematics resources over at https://math.libretexts.org/Bookshelves.

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