Every formula has a person behind it. Most books about mathematics keep the formula and drop the person; the page shows the curl of a magnetic field and moves on, and whoever spent a decade finding it disappears into a footnote or vanishes entirely.
So i built codex naturalis. It is a book of the advanced mathematics that shapes the world, the earth, the galaxies, nature, everything, and every plate in it keeps its originator's name on the page.
What it is
One long calm page, thirty plates, five ways into the same world; sky, earth, living, invisible, structure. Galaxy rotation curves sit a few scrolls from the golden angle in a sunflower, and the cube group sits next to the gauss-bonnet theorem, because the world does not file itself by subject.
Each plate carries the formula, a rigorous reading, and the intuition in plain words, and beneath them a small card for every person who got it there. Sixty nine so far, with the MacTutor archive at St Andrews behind the citations.
Attribution is part of the mathematics
The rule i cared about most: the book never performs a derivation as "i". The voice that curates is kept separate from the mathematics being shown, so the credit lands where it belongs. A formula without its originator is a quotation without a source, and the site treats it that way.
Every plate keeps its machine visible
Nine julia machines run the moving parts on the page; galaxy rotation, the figure eight orbit, jeans mass, eddington luminosity, the schechter function, phyllotaxis, lorenz, the hubble tension, and the cube group order. Behind them, rust referees problem submissions, cue validates the data before it ships, and vanilla javascript runs the interface because it should be.
Each machine ships with the command that reruns it, so nothing on the page is a picture of a result nobody can reproduce.
The cube plate is the one that got away from me. It carries the exact group order, 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 positions, god's number at 20 as the diameter of the position graph, a cayley graph worth walking, and thistlethwaite's subgroup layers underneath it.
The arena, and the ledger
Twenty five open problems, two under review, one verified, twelve closed pages, three attempts recorded. The ledger states where each attempt stands; attempted, under review, verified, or withdrawn. Nothing upgrades silently.
The part i insisted on: submitted solutions live on the site, not in a table of links somewhere. Rendered proof, witness code embedded, solver's name attached. A name in a list is not a solution.
The solving desk
Open the desk and it hands out a problem; roll the die or scramble the shared cube and the choice is uniform over whatever is open. The desk lays out the statement, the definitions, the related plates, the machines with their rerun commands, and every existing attempt as a dated note.
Submitting composes a prefilled github issue, because there is no backend here and i did not want one. The page says so plainly: an attempt lands in the ledger only after its pull request merges, and that can take a day.
The rest of the shelf
A toy shelf with buffon's needles, the galton board, the chaos game and hilbert's hotel. A bookplate generator that sets a chosen plate into a printable ex libris, originators named on it. Listen to the math, which turns a sequence into sound through web audio. And a question box under every plate, feeding a discussions room where the book can be argued with.
What is deliberately not there
No accounts, no database, no tracking, no server side build. The whole thing is static files on vercel, and the machinery lives in the repo rather than in the site. The site hosts the book; it does not host the factory.
What i learned
- Attribution takes as long as the mathematics; sixty nine cards is sixty nine small biographies
- A formula is easier to trust when the machine beside it can be rerun from a terminal
- A public ledger only means something if attempts stay visible after they fail
- Curating is not claiming; the voice that keeps the book is not the voice that did the work
It is static, it is free, and it is one link away.
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