I’m writing a computer graphics software package that I definitely want other people to use. And today I made an unusual decision in its design.<\/p>\n
You see, there is one place where all of the standard packages ask users to specify an angle in degrees, so that a full circle is 360o<\/sup> around. This seems reasonable enough on the face of it. After all, it’s the way most people think about a circle.<\/p>\n But in fact, when people do actual math in computer graphics, they always work in radians, so that a full circle is 2π around (just like they teach you in math class). Hence my dilemma.<\/p>\n Should I go with the same “friendly to most people” standard that the other packages use (degrees), or should I be consistent with the way computer graphics is actually done by people who do computer graphics (radians)?<\/p>\n Eventually, I decided that this is really a political question: When I invite people to use my package, what tribe am I asking them to align themselves with? Because there really are multiple tribes here.<\/p>\n There are the people who say “I just want to call a software package that does stuff for me, and I really don’t care to know how it works.” Then there are people who say “I am using this package as a starting point for what will be my own experiments and mathematical innovations in computer graphics.”<\/p>\n Since I teach computer graphics, I realized that I’m really designing this for that second tribe — my tribe. I want people to poke around inside my code, see how I am doing things, maybe come up with their own way of doing it better. I am making this software available not merely to provide a convenience but to invite a dialog.<\/p>\n In the end I am choosing radians. Which means that I am chosing sides, aligning myself with those people who really want to dive deep and learn all about computer graphics.<\/p>\n Because math, like everything else, is political.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m writing a computer graphics software package that I definitely want other people to use. And today I made an unusual decision in its design. You see, there is one place where all of the standard packages ask users to specify an angle in degrees, so that a full circle is 360o around. This seems … Continue reading “The politics of math”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16780"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16780"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16781,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16780\/revisions\/16781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}