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Show HN: I built a math website the internet loved, I'm back with more features (teachyourselfmath.app)

289 points by viveknathani_ ↗ HN
A few months back, I published my website, teachyourselfmath, which shows you a list of math problems parsed automatically from PDFs around the world. It received a tremendous amount of feedback and interest. And I was honestly overwhelmed by the response and then life happened.

Over the past few weeks, I have been actively working on this project, trying to incorporate all the feedback and I’d love to share it with the world again. New features: 1. Filter problems by difficulty and category 2. Bookmark your favorite problems 3. Editor in the comment section supports markdown formatting 4. ...and some UI improvements throughout the website

I am also starting a small telegram community of math nerds who would like to discuss all things math, as well as talk about upcoming features and feedback for the website. Here is the link - (https://t.me/teachyourselfmath)

If you’d like to support my work through small donations, you can do it here - (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/viveknathani). Right now, teachyourselfmath runs for free. Later, I’d love to make features that people would love to pay for but fundamentally, the goal is to make math accessible through technology. There’s a lot of peer learning involved in the comments section of these math problems. All of this gives me more reason to keep working on this.

Happy hacking!

55 comments

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mgd
As someone who has struggled with learning maths, this looks really great. I've set up an account and look forward to giving it a try

And yes, the Hacker News minimal style of the website is very much appreciated! well done

who-shot-jr
This looks fantastic, getting better at maths is something I have always wanted to do.

Also, some of the commenters have posted python code but it is not formatted/styled.

viveknathani_
hi! glad you like the site.

i have introduced a markdown editor in this release. that should fix the code formatting issues going forward.

thanks!

franciscop
Are you interested in using https://vector-graph.com/ to add math diagrams? I created it exactly for this kind of websites and I'd be happy to waiver the fee for your site!
viveknathani_
wow! this seems amazing. let me chalk out the roadmap for this site and reach out to you accordingly. thank you for your interest!
namanyayg
so beautiful :) how much time did it take to build?
franciscop
Thanks! I made it 2-3 years ago and IIRC it took me few months of weekend work; the things is that it was "easy" in the beginning, but for each combination of "feature" + "drawing type" things got a lot more complex, specially later on. e.g. when adding the option to shift the grid, or scale it, then I needed to change all of the drawing methods; or when I add a new drawing method, then it needs to work with all the other configs. So a lot of the code is basically dealings with these cases.

It also has a lot of logic trying to position things so that they look nice, specially around the axis arrows/numbers (since any overflow off the SVG would be cut off).

internetter
How many licenses have you sold?
franciscop
Unfortunately none. Once I finished the library I realized I was barking at the wrong tree, meaning this would probably be better for high-value high integration business (B2B) rather than to sell to small blogs that have maths in them at B2C prices. But then I also got a job and so while the library works just fine, I haven't put the energy into selling it.
nutanc
This looks really cool. Possible to connect with you to see how we can also use this for https://books.innings2.com/demo.

This is a free website for math content from grade 6-10th. This fits with our design philosophy. Want to see if we can make something interactive with vector-graph

two_handfuls
That looks very cool! One piece of feedback if I may: I tried the section for “similar triangles” and I got through a few questions (love the content), but then it ends like this:

> So, the two quadrilaterals are not similar. Similarly, you may note that in the two quadrilaterals (a square and a rhombus) of Fig, corresponding sides are in the same ratio, but their corresponding angles are not equal. Again, the two polygons (quadrilaterals) are not similar.

With no button to move forward, and no obvious conclusion text. At the bottom it says “1 of 3”. I’m not sure of there should have been some button letting me continue or if I’m supposed to press the menu button and just go to a different section because I’m done.

Hope this feedback is useful. The site looks great otherwise, and explained very clearly!

nutanc
Hey. Thanks for trying it out and for taking the pains to share your feedback. Have seen some places where the content mismatch is happening and the continuation is missing. What we have realized is that getting the content creators(math educators) and the site creators(developers) to synch up is the biggest problem in this :)

We have done one round of content cleaning, hope to have most of the content with no issues by this month end.

indigodaddy
Re: the X x Y x Z = 44 prime factorization problem.

If I started with 11 it gave an initial incorrect. It must be best practice to start with the lowest primes then for this sort of problem?

nutanc
Yes. The component has this rule in place as thats how the educator decided to add the rule. But we are updating the component to include other options also.
two_handfuls
Oh that looks cool! I have a static page with some math content, could use this!
HFguy
This is good work. Are there examples of sites that have used your library? There weren't any links on your website.
iamwil
Are the diagrams interactive?
breadsniffer01
I’m building a STEM tutor (https://withmarble.io). Right now it works for programming, but next is Math. I’ll test out your library and if it suits, I’ll buy a license. Thanks for sharing!
n4r9
Nice work. Out of curiosity, how is the difficulty determined? I notice that some of the "hard" questions (inverting a 2x2 matrices or differentiating common functions) are much easier than others (proving that no natural number has Euler totient equal to 14).
viveknathani_
hi! right now, it is manually assigned after parsing the problems. i am figuring out a relative system for assigning difficulty automatically.
n4r9
I don't envy you the task! You've probably thought about it a lot more than me, but I was wondering if you could add a "very hard" or "advanced" category. Or perhaps users could submit difficulty ratings as a percentage and you take the average.
viveknathani_
you are right, user-submitted content can help too. but that would imply a difficulty setting based on all users who have participated instead of a globally agreeable difficulty value. if the smart ones find a hard problem to be easy and they are the only ones to attempt that problem, that problem would be marked as easy.

on the "very hard"/"advanced" bit, feedback taken.

thank you for writing your thoughts!

ajkjk
I feel like the obvious answer is to let people vote on it, like an upvotes/downvotes system.
ktallett
IMO, I think in the grand scheme of things proofs are always tricky so it generally would be in a higher difficulty no matter the problem. However in the category of number theory, that would be say an easier proof than some others.
antinone
cool.

highly recommend to implement the review exercise style of https://www.executeprogram.com/!, both the UI, albeit with better theming (https://monkeytype.com/), and the spaced repition feature, all while keeping the hn styled comment section, although i'd let none-related comments run horizontally to click through different approaches/explanation(-styles).

you got a startup there. keep it affordable. 5 bucks a month after u get a propper UI and spaced repetition with different numbers integrated.

great, simple, idea! let the copycat-wars begin :D

viveknathani_
hahaha thanks! it is easy to put up a paywall but like you rightly pointed out, i'd love to make something worth paying for. until then, i don't know what direction this project will be taking. i'll keep iterating.

thanks for writing in!

Ciantic
Looks good, one quick thing: Maybe hide the comments behind a button? Now they are giving away the answer, as some have already posted it there in the first comments.
robbiejs
Hey OP,

Love the headline. Very confident ;-)

Brosper
Hmm what about the UX/UI. I don't feel it
king_magic
I love this. Great job. Bought you some coffee.
mattl
The font size is a little small on mobile and the layout breaks if you increase it.
npilk
Cool website! But I hope titles like these don't become common on HN - I really appreciate the 'no clickbait' policy here.
ilikegreen
I remember when you first posted this and it is a project I think upon very frequently! It's nice to see you have made further progress — and that there are comments with attempts at solving! Great job.

I still find some problems with the navigation of the problems, but I am not even sure where to go to fix that. It has to do with the difficulty of each problem, but also with how large each topic is: algebra encompasses both linear algebra and linear equation solving, which is a very wide bracket.

But you're making progress. That's great! Congratulations on that, and I'll be sure to keep visiting the website.

viveknathani_
this comment has my heart, thank you!

i understand that the difficulty metric right now does not do justice to the problem's representation - i will come up with a better solution for this.

on the point of topic granularity - i understand that it feels vague right now but i also wonder what the depth should be. i will do some research on how to solve this better.

lastly, if you are interested, there's also a small community i am making around this - https://t.me/teachyourselfmath

thank you for all the feedback!

mojomark
Cool, but all I see are comments and attempts at solutions. Are the actual correct solutions available somewhere in the app that I'm not seeing?
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eappleby
I love it! I also built a math focused website. Schools can use it to host Math-A-Thons, which is a type of fundraiser where students answer math problems online and solicit donations to support their school. I made all the math problems available to play for free outside of the platform, as well as guides that help the students answer the problems:

https://www.forourschool.org/math-games https://www.forourschool.org/math-guides

Yay Math!!

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koshergweilo
Small nitpick, instead of having a "back to home" button on the left, maybe just make the logo in the navbar a link to the homepage.