Mathepedia

writingmathmathepedia

I am a math major, and finding reliable sources to learn math can be difficult. There are a few established places, like Khan Academy, which do supply great free dedicated learning content for math. Some others include:

This is of course an non-exhaustive list and I maintain nothing but grace for anyone willing to publish math content on the internet, these are just the people I regularly find on my YouTube recommended.

This list is quite a curiosity, because with the notable exception of Khan Academy these are all YouTube channels. Throughout all my time in undergrad university, this small list of popular sources are the popular go-to people to understand math when the professor wasn’t sufficient. There is also an overwhelmingly significant exclusion from this list: Wikipedia.

To directly quote Wikipedia on a page titled Using Wikipedia for mathematics self-study: “Wikipedia is a reference site, not a website directly designed to teach any topic.” Empirically through conversation with dozens if not hundreds of mathematicians over my life, this is not what I nor anyone else wants in a math resource. There simply doesn’t exist an alternative mathematics wiki or non-video-based resource that can answer questions about math at any level. So today I put forward a new resource into the world: Mathepedia.org.

Mathepedia.org is a Wikipedia-esque website purely dedicated to explaining mathematical concepts. The main focus will lie on explaining math as Wikipedia does not, but there is room for some more meta-articles on math in pop culture or math classes. The main difference from Wikipedia is that my main intention is to be a source to learn from and understand topics, and I will accomplish this by employing an approach opposite to that of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia (being a self-declared “reference site” and not a “teaching site”) has the main goal of containing information that could be cited elsewhere, and in the context of mathematics has successfully accomplished neither goal. Mathepedia exists in a different structure entirely, where every page begins with a high-level layman’s definition and progressively becomes more complicated and technically correct as the page continues.

By structuring pages as such I believe that Mathepedia can become a foundational learning resource for people around the world. The project can be found at Mathepedia.org or for now on my github where anyone is welcome to submit a PR to a change or article. All content on Mathepedia will be human-written (I suspect largely by myself) and I used Claude to create the style so I can focus on the content that matters.

I hope to see you there!

P.S.: Here is a neat bonus video that partially inspired my creation of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33y9FMIvcWY