Triangle of Power
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it in notation debates as a clean visual demonstration that exponents, logs and roots are three views of one relationship.
What it is
3Blue1Brown presents the Triangle of Power, an alternate notation that unifies powers, logarithms and roots in a single triangular symbol. The video shows how the inverse operations relate and how the notation could help.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2016 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec Houshalter · 2017-06 · on “Towards a Better Notation for Mathematics (2010) [pdf]”
My favorite new math notation is the triangle of power: [this video] I slightly modified it to avoid subscript and keep it closer to existing notation for powers: [LINK]
Strong rec hashar · 2023-06 · on “Ego and Math – 3B1B 2023 Stanford Math Department Commencement Speech [video]”
I opened the video in the background and immediately recognized the person: the author behind the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel. It has a long series of video regarding various mathematical topics which are rather accessible. My favorite by far is a "proposal" for an alternate notation which makes much more sense and, if adopted, would make mathematics way less intimidating (Triangle of Power (2016), 3Blue1Brown - [this video] ). I'd give him a Fields medal (or at least an honorary mention of some sort) :-]
Recommends norepicycle · 2018-05 · on “Experimental music notation resources (2015)”
3Blue1Brown has a YouTube video called the "Triangle of Power" which uses a clever bit of notation to unify exponents and logarithms: [this video] A bit lowbrow, perhaps (you'd want Penrose notation or such things in that case).
Recommends Banana699 · 2022-04 · on “Bad but interesting mathematical notation idea”
Bad/Confusing/Complex notation can absolutely ruin a learner's attempt to grok a piece of math, it's not a trivial issue at all, and it comes up in all levels of math. But good notation doesn't necessarily mean easy understanding. It's just like language. If I speak a different language, forget about communication in any deep way. But even if I'm speaking the same language, it's still not guaranteed we can communicate well or at all. Absence of shared language guarantees the impossibility of communication, but it's presence guarantees nothing. The author is correct about one thing : Notation is incredibly under-appreciated and under-discussed by mathematicians, although it has immense power
Recommends vaishnavsm · 2022-04 · on “Bad but interesting mathematical notation idea”
A similar idea was put forth on the math stack exchange [1], which I found through this 3blue1brown video [2]. Worth a read/watch! [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]
Cites tr · 2016-10 · on “Help support math education channel 3blue1brown (the Triangle of Power guy)”
The creator of the Triangle of Power ( [this video] ) and the Essence of Linear Algebra ( [LINK] ). He is now trying to focus full time on online math education.
Cites partycoder · 2017-03 · on “Abacus use can boost math skills”
In addition, the choice of algorithms in use for arithmetics are a bit counterproductive. Then, notation in some cases is inconsistent and weird. [this video]
Cites partycoder · 2017-11 · on “Problems of Traditional Math Notation (2004)”
3Blue1Brown made a video about math notation for power/logarithms/roots: [this video] It's messy to actually draw a triangle, but there are alternative notations for it.