{"id":11959,"date":"2013-04-13T19:08:40","date_gmt":"2013-04-14T00:08:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=11959"},"modified":"2013-04-13T19:09:40","modified_gmt":"2013-04-14T00:09:40","slug":"a-picture-is-worth-210-equations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=11959","title":{"rendered":"A picture is worth 2<sup>10<\/sup> equations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s amazing how much easier it is to make something clear in a visual proof &#8212; using pictures rather than equations.  Just for comparison, I wrote down the proof I described yesterday using equations instead of pictures, thinking I would post that today.<\/p>\n<p>I encountered two problems:  (1) Most people who read this blog won&#8217;t be able to follow the equations.  (2) Even if they did, there are too many steps.<\/p>\n<p>The biggest difference is at the end, when I showed how those three faces of the cube (which I colored red, green and blue) magically flatten out into three parallelograms to form the hexagon (after you add that one sphere in the center).<\/p>\n<p>From the picture, it&#8217;s immediately obvious how this works.  But not from the equations.  So a story that is simple and elegant when told in pictures becomes a lot less simple and elegant when told with equations.<\/p>\n<p>I wonder whether there might be some sort of hybrid way of describing such things &#8212; something half way between equations and pictures, so that you can get the best of both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s amazing how much easier it is to make something clear in a visual proof &#8212; using pictures rather than equations. Just for comparison, I wrote down the proof I described yesterday using equations instead of pictures, thinking I would post that today. I encountered two problems: (1) Most people who read this blog won&#8217;t &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=11959\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;A picture is worth 2<sup>10<\/sup> equations&#8221;<\/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":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11959"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11959"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11961,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11959\/revisions\/11961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}