The project, briefly.
Euclid is a small, deliberately slow research and practice environment, organised around a single thesis: that durable understanding is built, not received — and that the practice environments which build it have to be designed against, not along with, the surfaces of contemporary information life.
What is here.
Three things, related: an essay collection on the cognitive consequences of frictionless explanation; a laboratory of interactive Euclidean propositions, designed as small instruments for training explicit reasoning; and a vocabulary that lets the work of the first two be talked about precisely.
None of this is finished. Some of it is unlikely to be finished. The point is closer to a long, unhurried writing-and-building practice than to a product — although the practice produces, and will continue to produce, things that are usable.
What is not here.
- A taxonomy of every learning theory.
- A frictionless on-ramp to mastery in seven days.
- A claim that this is the only, or even the best, way to think about learning.
- Anything that prefers stimulation to reflection.
A short methodological note.
The project takes the position that practice precedes theory and artefact precedes argument. This is why almost every essay here is paired with something to do, and why almost every Lab activity is paired with something to read. Neither half is sufficient alone; together they make the position the project actually holds, which is that understanding is constructed by the learner, in the presence of well-designed friction, and is diagnosed by what survives delay.
Whom this is for.
For people who suspect that the abundance of clear explanations around them is not, by itself, making them more capable. For people who want to test that suspicion against something. For people who do not need to be entertained in order to think seriously, but who would rather their reading and practice be beautiful than ugly. For people who are willing to do less, more slowly.
Influences acknowledged.
The project owes obvious debts to the long tradition of explorable explanations (most directly to the work of Bartosz Ciechanowski, Distill, and Nicky Case); to Stripe Press for demonstrating that intellectual seriousness and editorial care are compatible; to Brilliant for taking interactive learning seriously as a craft; and to a long line of writers — Polya, Bjork, Dehaene, Christiansen, and many others — for the cognitive-science substrate beneath the design choices made here.
How to reach us.
Maintained by Jesse M. Blum. Questions, errata, intellectual disagreements, and reports of broken proofs are welcome — but please be patient with the response time; this is not a product with a support team.
- Email — jmb@bw1.be
- Source — gitlab.com/euclidlab/euclid
- Issues — gitlab.com/euclidlab/euclid/-/issues
- Privacy — how the site handles data
Code is licensed under MIT; essays, glossary, commentary, and figures are licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. The Euclidean text itself (Heath, 1908) is in the public domain.