[Numpy-discussion] Math Inspector Beta

[Ralf Gommers]

Hi Matt,

Very cool, thanks for sharing!


On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 12:19 AM Matt Calhoun <calhoun137 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Everyone!  I have been using numpy for an extremely long time, but this
> is the first time emailing the list.  I recently released the beta version
> of my free open source math app called math inspector, and so far the
> response has been really amazing, it was on the front page of hacker news
> all day sunday and went from 15 stars to 348 on GitHub since then.  I
> wanted to reach out to the community to find out if people like this
> project, have any feedback/suggestions/feature requests, or would possibly
> be interested in placing a link to the website (mathinspector.com) on the
> numpy homepage.
>

We have an Ecosystem section on numpy.org, we can add it there. There's an
Interactive Computing section where it kind of fits (although a place
labeled education would be better). There's some discussion on the numpy.org
issue tracker (
https://github.com/numpy/numpy.org/issues/313#issuecomment-751466980) about
moving that to its own tab instead of having it as an entry under
"Scientific computing", but for now we could add it there under
Jupyter/IPython/Binder.


> Math inspector is a python interpreter which contains a frozen version of
> python and numpy, this makes it very easy for non-technical people to get
> started, it also creates a block coding environment which represents the
> memory of the running program.  This block coding environment is at such a
> high level of generality that it's capable of working for all of python.
> It also has an interactive graphing system made in pygame which updates and
> modernizes all of the functionality in matplotlib.  This graphing system is
> it's own stand alone module by the way.  Math inspector also has a
> documentation browser which creates a beautiful interactive experience for
> exploring the documentation.
>
> Everything in math inspector has been designed specifically for
> numpy, even though it works for all of python.  I started it 2 years ago
> when I got really confused after searching through the numpy website, and I
> wanted to build a system where I could dig into the modules in a directory
> file type structure that was highly organized.  From there everything just
> took off.
>

One thing I realized when browsing through the video on your front page is
that the public module layout we have is very unhelpful for this kind of
education - it'd be good if we had a way to hide things like core, emath,
matrixlib, etc. that we don't want people to import and use directly.
Essentially we'd to teach people mostly about the main namespace, and fft,
linalg, and random.

If you have other thoughts on what would help you to make NumPy more
approachable, in Math Inspector or in general, those would be great to hear.

Cheers,
Ralf



> The main goal of this project is to support the mathematics education
> community on youtube, by providing a free tool that everyone can use to
> share code samples for their videos, but I believe it has a wide range of
> additional applications for scientific computing as well.
>
> I have been working really hard on this project, and I really hope
> everyone likes it!
>
> You can find the full source code on the GitHub page:
> https://github.com/MathInspector/MathInspector
>
> Cheers!
> - Matt
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