> When Illustrating a mathematical idea, the first thing you need to decide is the scale.
I have spent much of my life illustrating mathematical ideas, and scale is never the first thing I decide. Most commonly it stays abstract and there is no scale; it's flexible and I can zoom in and out at will. Sometimes I will choose a scale partway through or towards the end of an explanation, if I want to use a specific analogy, but I can comfortably rescale it to something else - the scale is never fixed.
Interesting to see such a different view.
Totally agree. I really enjoyed the article, and the illustrations are really cool but scale is just something I don’t even consider. Even the very first question baffled me, when it said “Picture a torus. Is it big or small?”
I answered an unambiguous “yes”.
Also, we haven’t defined measure yet here have we? What does it even mean for something to have scale without measure?