Compassionate Math#
This book has been inspired by the principles of “Compassionate mathematics”[1].
“Compassionate Math acknowledges that different learners take different roads to understanding the same mathematical idea and encourages one to consider this inherent plurality of thought patterns when communicating mathematics.”
Acccordingly, this book attempts to reveal the thought-process behind creating mathematics (category theory) using story-telling, lots of illustrations, and visualization of computations. Minimizing the requirement for coding background, we have incorporated live-coding whenever possible. As such, this book is close to a creative non-fiction in formal mathematics. It is a new kind of experiment.
The process of learning something new is like building a machine by collecting its many little parts, and by screwing all those parts together. When we got all the parts and when all those parts are in their right place screwed together, then the machine can take us forward in our further explorations! Most of the textbooks focus on providing the big screws and the parts of its machine to the reader. However, its the tiny nuts and bolts which decide if someone’s understanding is tight and intact, or not. What this book does is to provide as much importance to the tiny nuts and bolts as much as to the big screws. Consequently, this book covers just enough material towards its goal in terms of breadth and depth. This has been made possible by the story-telling style of writing.