Word Clouds of ADS Chapters

 I'm teaching the second semester of our Discrete Structures sequence and gave a quiz simply asking students to define group.  The results were not so good.  The emphasize how important it is to know this and other definitions, I decided to construct a word cloud of Chapter 11, which is an introduction to Algebraic Structures, mostly groups.   

My first attempt - just asking Mathematica to construct a word cloud of the text -  was not satisfactory since all the non-math words got in the way, although group was still prominent.  My solution was to take the index of the book and generate a list of the words in it.   Then I selected from the text only those words that appear in the index, keeping duplicates.  The result is pretty good.  I did the same for the chapter on graphs, Chapter 9.

Word Cloud for Chapter 11

Word Cloud for Chapter 9

One benefit of doing this is that I could catch words that should be in the index that are missing. One word I expected in the graph cloud was edge.  It was totally missing because I had neglected to include it in the index - something that I'm going to fix!

Applied Discrete Structures now available on LibreTexts!

Without having to ask me, the LibreTexts project has adopted Applied Discrete Structures (ADS) to their library!  Don't get me wrong - the point to making ADS an OER project is to make it available to as many instructors and students as possible at no cost. So I'm delighted that they've added the project.  

I was unfamiliar with LibreTexts until now. Understandable because its a relatively new project.  It started with Chemistry content but has since branched in to other sciences, mathematics, engineering and more.

For a good introduction to LibreTexts check out this video from LibreFest 2023

Applied Discrete Structures is still available in other form factors at https://discretemath.org