An Infinitely Large Napkin [pdf]

[quirino]

Evan Chen is a very valuable person in the Math Olympiad scene.

The Geometry book [1] he wrote in high school is required reading for any serious competitor and I believe he is the main responsible for some bringing some techniques into the olympic meta, such as Barycentric Coordinates.

Also, his blog post [2] about writing is one of the best ones I've ever read.

[1] https://web.evanchen.cc/geombook.html [2] https://blog.evanchen.cc/2015/03/14/writing/

[voidhorse]

Seems like a really interesting person. Off topic, but his assertions that the majority of students are “conned” into thinking math is important is strange to me. Almost everyone I know always knew they’d never need to know the Pythagorean theorem for the vast majority of life’s obstacles—they weren’t tricked into thinking it was important, they learned it because as a kid you don’t have any power and are coerced to complete certain tests to make your way along a certain circumscribed educational track.

[dezren39]

thank you for this comment this turned my day around

[dang]

A bit of past discussion:

An Infinitely Large Napkin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20168936 - June 2019 (32 comments)

An Infinitely Large Napkin [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467506 - Sept 2016 (3 comments)

[mgradowski]

This book exposed me to proper math back in high school, I liked it.

[jimmyvalmer]

Never heard the author, but having read his blog, I've concluded I am this guy modulo the talent and the fact that he got to my way of thinking in half the time.

[Cauchy2022]

Off-topic: Mobile version only loads the title page of the book and leaves all remaining pages blank. I thought that was the joke.

[tartakovsky]

1. Not off topic. 2. Mobile version of what, it’s a pdf. 3. I can see the full text on my iPhone.

[lupire]

It's 900pages (but under 10MB on disk) so your app might have trouble getting it into memory.