Mimolok

A prototype example of one possible mimolok presentation.

Concept

I am writing a book that will hopefully get people interested in mathematics. It will do this in a number of ways:

1. It will not look like a maths book.
2. It will be a riddle, like trying to decode a dead language, or sci-fi glyphs on an alien artefact.
3. It will be readable by aliens, assuming no cultural baggage such as spoken language, or 'meaningful symbols' such as arrows.
4. It will be written completely in a symbolic language that emphasises mathematic patterns rather than 'topics'.
5. It will be a picture book.
6. The symbols will employ a range of colours and patterns, and the 'rules' for arranging the symbols are such that
   • there are many 'simplest ways' to make the same mathematical statement,
   • the mather has free choice regarding the colour, shape and arrangement to suit their aesthetic and mathematical goals,
   • thus the mathematics then becomes an overtly creative medium and even simple mathematical 'sentences' lend themselves to becoming works of art,
   • the number of ways to group and distinguish terms is nigh-infinite,
   • the reader can arbitrarily replace crazy symbols with a their own crazy symbols, and things will make sense as long as they do it consistently! They could even use the crazy letters and numbers of traditionally-presented mathematics if they wanted.
7. depending on my eventual aims for the book, the symbol language may gradually 'evolve' into something reminiscent of the 'traditional format' as the narrative progresses.

This shares many features of a cypher I invented recently - the main goals of which were to not look like encrypted text, and to be infinitely mutable (so as to yield aesthetic possibilities while being difficult to attack). I will post some examples soon! Other inspiration has come from having a look at the Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini (some of it is here, but it's well worth obtaining a full copy from somewhere else)... and other weird things that appear to be full of hidden meaning - such as the Universe.

Meanwhile, enjoy some example of the kind of thing I'm going for - see the included photograms. There's also a kind of catalogue here.

Mimolok?

How it feels to learn mathematics.

Maths students are often bogged down in their memories, trying to keep a million different 'topics', a billion different solution methods and an infinitude of mathematical 'dance steps' in mind. Apart from a few brilliant insights due to crazy mathematicians over the years, very few of these dance steps are worth remembering - the rest are just trivial extensions of the general logic. Committing these to memory is a stressful waste of time - it's easier and far powerier to understand the very basic logic that underpins mathematical reasoning, and trust it to carry you places.

So with this perspective, I have been writing some chapters for a mathematics book - the aim of the book being to demonstrate this simplicity, through application to what I gather are the main 'exit points', where people walk away from their mathematical selves. This is usually at a point of great confusion, and in school this means failure - so naturally, a person will assume that they are fundamentally no good at maths! However, confusion is a result of a poorly-made logical case, or an error in logic. Due to time constraints in the classroom, there often isn't a chance to elaborate on these pared-down arguments; it seems that the need for schools to 'get through the material' supersedes the goals of 'producing good mathematicians' and 'not crushing the confidence of young people', but I digress...

The chapters of the book treat the basic logic, then look at few of those insanely insightful tricks (which themselves are consequences of simple logic) and mesh them into the 'maths is simple' framework. I have half-written chapters on straight lines, squartics (quadratrics) and other polynomials, trigonometry and differential calculus, along with some 'nice' philosophical musings about the wonderful thing that mathematics can be. The approach is similar to the way I have approached tutoring - "let's see where logic can get us..."; every problem is an experiment, just like in the rest of reality. Unfortunately, the book is very wordy, looks exactly like a maths textbook, and lacks the unity I wanted it to have. It would be more suitable as a reference book rather than a complete reprogramming course.

The title of the book was to be Maths Is More Or Less OK. I put it on the 'backburner' when I started getting excited about the colours and shapes. Since this current idea has many of the same aims as the original project, I decided to keep the title in some form. Its acroynm happened to form a strange-sounding word: MIMOLOK!

Development

This is some kind of schematic. Research indicates that the large white terms are initial assumptions, and that the colour blue is associated with experimental assumptions.

This is a black and white version of the same circuitry. Pages like this could be collected in an appendix at the back of the book for photocopying/printing/reference/burning.

Another schematic, containing some of the structures of an earlier schematic.

Black and white version of half of the above circuitry.

Black and white version of the other half.

This appears to be a statement rather than a schematic. It contains some of the elements found in other images. It may turn out to be important & helpful in determining the meaning of the first image on this page.

Something approximating a melding between maths and alien pond-life.

• Vector graphics - Flash has the ability to call up 'instances' of the same object, whose individual properties can be tweaked. This is instead of copying, or making new ones from scratch. Much more efficient from a computational perspective, and allows system-wide changes by modifying properties of the master object. Working in Flash also opens up the possibility of animation, yet another dimension to the create-o-verse of this mimolok thing. Of course, it would be better to use an open-source equivalent to Flash.

• Collaboration: I want your help! On every aspect of this project. Probably you'll have some more ideas when I've posted more stuff to look at. Even if you can just think of more ways in which this general concept might be cool, or ways in which it sucks, or if you just want to comment from the sidelines! DO IT! For the good of The People!

• Collaboration 2.0! I want to be saying 'we' rather than 'I' when discussing the makings of this book! People to test out the symbols and logic as we go along are a necessity; there's a few main types of tester that I can think of:
  • people who are fluent in this symbol madness who can check the consistency, play around with the logic and suggest alternatives to stuff what is writ
  • people who are aware that this has some mathematical content, who can see if the logic/meanings are actually obtainable from the text
  • people who don't know it's anything to do with mathematics, who'll be able to tell us if the book is overtly mathy
  • and anyone for commentary on the general aesthetic of the book

• Colour schemes on the derivation circuitry will have to be chosen so as not to disadvantage the colourblind! Fortunately, any necessary changes will be reasonably easy to implement. Things are currently set up in a way such that every symbol could be replaced with a braille equivalent in SECONDS if necessary!

• Running into a small spot of difficulty with POWER notation. I had the notion that we could do away with messy division by using negative powers. A consequence of this is raising things the the power of zero. This is easy enough to deal with, unless of course you want to talk about 0^0. This is a potential HOLE in the maths...x^x tends towards 0 as x->0 from 'above', while doing some other kind of thing as x-> from 'below'! This is to say nothing of how to describe 0^-1. Looks like the power notation, which is just shorthand multiplication, brings with it the need for NEW AXIOMS, interesting that the mathematical structure already needs some bandaids and rubber bands to hold it together.