To math explanations and beyond!

Wow, it’s been a while since our last update! A lot of things have happened since. In April @5 has officially become a co-founder of Arbital, and @76 joined as our first engineer. Together we’ve been super busy improving Arbital so it can grow into the best platform for math explanations.

Writing party

We hosted one writing party, where we invited several people we deeply admire, who can create really good math explanations and content. There were snacks, math jokes, and lots of typing! Thanks goes out to @32, @16g, @3s9, @3sp, and a few other folks for showing up and seeding Arbital with initial content.

Since the party, Nate is continuing to write his explanation of information theory noteIf you are curious to read the work-in-progress pages, check out log as generalized length and exchange rates between digits, Tsvi is wring a guide on Bayes networks, and multiple other authors are contributing individual pages.

We’ll be hosting more such parties in the future! If you are interested in participating (in person or remotely), signup for the newsletter (check the “explaining math topics” box).

Growing math domain

Our goal for the next few months is to create and publish explanations that you can’t get anywhere else. We want to grow a community of explainers who can work with each other, build on each other’s content, and come up with brilliant, intuitive, and insightful math explanations.

You can help! We’ve made it very easy to contribute: go to the home page and check out the “Write” panel. Anyone can write and submit a page to math domain. Try it out, and let us know what you think!

Featured page

We are going to continue our tradition of selecting one page to be showcased in our update. This time it’s the page explaining uncountability. It has two very nice lenses, which make the concept accessible to most people.

Updates

Here is the non-exhaustive list of things we’ve been working on since the last update:

Overall polish: we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from our writers. Lots of bugs have been found and squashed, and lots of sharp edges have been smoothed over.

Better math rendering: the editor was pretty hard to use with pages that had a lot of math, but now the experience is significantly better.

Notes: we continue to expand our Markdown syntax to include features like notes: noteNotes allow the author to expand on what they are saying without bothering the readers who are happy with the short version..

Marks: anyone can select text, and click “spelling/​grammar” button to quickly send feedback to the authors of the page.

Queries: anyone can select text, and click “question” button to type their query. This will help authors improve the page, and over time the platform will accumulate a collection of canonical questions and answers, so people with similar questions can get their answer immediately.

Explore view: you can now look at the page hierarchy for any given page. For example, here is all our math content.

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