[Edu-sig] some new open source Python writing (Jupyter Notebooks)

[Wes Turner]

On Monday, September 4, 2017, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> wrote:

> PS:
>
> my recent exercises in teaching math with Python, ala Peter Farrell, is
> sparking some heated debate on math-teach.
>
> http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2876811  (especially in
> recent days, early September 2017)
>
> Bob Hansen is trashing this writing as some of the worst pedagogy he's
> ever seen.
>
> I'm trying to incorporate some of his feedback in my latest revisions.
>

Maybe a bit OT:

I've wondered whether we could/should instead start mathematics education
with bits as entropy (information theory first)?:

- base 2: 00, 01, 10, 11 (on our hands (2**?))
- counting
- ASCII (0-127)
  - how do we know the number represents an integer or a character? ...
Encoding, Types
  - The number zero is actually # (code point): ___
- Unicode
- class SpecialString(str)


- Binary and then floating point arithmetic
  - unary, binary operators
    - import operators: sorted(dir(operators))
  - left and right shift
  - multiplication as repeated addition
  - long division
    - floating point (error, BigFloat)
    - symbolic mathematics
      - MathJax, LaTeX (how to even type this?)
      - CAS: SymPy, latex2sympy

- Entropy
  - Independence of observations
  - Maximum Information

...

class Shape
class Quadrilateral
class Rectangle
class Square
class Triangle
class RightTriangle
def perimiter
def area
def vertexes

def scale
def rotate

class PlatonicSolid

...

Are there computer science & mathematics curricula like this (that start
with entropy)?



> Our debates are reminiscent of some we've had here on this list in years
> gone by.
>
> I've also been chronicling my progress in this related thread:
>
> http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2877392
>
> Kirby
>
>
>
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