Mathematics often seems more discovered than invented; we're simply stumbling over things in a Platonic realm. Are there interface ideas with a similarly Platonic character, not so much invented as discovered?
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They often feel more contingent e.g. on our physiology, our culture, the nature of the information we prioritize representing. Things like rubber banding or pinch-to-zoom on a touch screen are so thumb-ish! But e.g. mutable linked representations are maybe more Platonic…
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Yeah, that aspect confuses the issue somewhat. For mutable linked repns, do you mean like mutable linked lists? Or do you have something else in mind?
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Oh, no, I mean e.g. connecting a slider and a figure, or connecting multiple differing figures representing the same data in different ways, as in worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstra and contemporaries. By "linked" I mean "linked parameterizations"—change param at one, read output at many.
Many apparently Platonic mathematical theorems have a very similar flavour: different "discovered" representations of the same object.
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