// the find
mnielsen/magic_paper
Experiments in an explorable visual medium for mathematics
A research prototype from Michael Nielsen exploring what an explorable, visual medium for doing mathematics could look like — sketch-based canvas interactions meant to accompany his essay on the idea. It's for people curious about alternative UIs for math/notation experimentation, not for anyone wanting a usable tool.
The idea itself is interesting — treating math notation as something you sketch and manipulate rather than type, and the small file set (canvas.js, glyphs.js, sketch.js) makes it fast to read end to end in an afternoon. MIT licensed, so there's nothing stopping you from forking and actually building on it.
The author states outright it's buggy, poorly structured, full of kludges, and misses edge cases — and that issues and PRs will be closed, so this is a dead end, not a maintained library. Only ever tested on Chrome 62 / OS X Sierra from 2017, meaning it may not even render correctly in a modern browser. No tests, no build tooling, no docs beyond the README — you're reading raw JS to understand behavior. Nine years without a push means any browser API it relied on could have shifted underneath it.