Could I get a critique of an addition to my Web site (knowledge of modular arithmetic required)?

I won’t comment on the math but there is a serious lack of contrast. It is amazingly hard to read.

I really like your way of thinking of addition mod 2 as addition of evens or odds. That makes it clear what you are doing without the person needing to understand modular arithmetic. It’s clever.

I don’t really follow your last paragraph. Perhaps it would help if you first demonstrated your idea of modular arithmetic with a smaller example and explained why the sums determine the placement of the final peg?

My next suggestion has to do with word choice rather than with concepts, so feel free to skip it since it doesn’t technically answer your question.

In the paragraph that begins, “If we could make subtraction the same as addition…” (4 paragraphs up from the picture), you say, “Adding or subtracting an odd number has the same affect on the evenness or the oddness of the result.” In this context, you should use “effect” instead of “affect.” Generally speaking, “effect” is a noun and “affect” is a verb (unless you are using “affect” to refer to emotion, then it is a noun).

There are formatting errors in the first two lines. It’s kind of off putting.

Letting it run the full width of the screen makes it difficult to read.

Text only is pretty daunting, even for the __library lovers.__

The image does not appear.

This is something I would like to understand, but I found it difficult to follow and stopped reading.

I just wanted to say that the image no longer appears for me, either. It did when I originally answered a couple days ago, but yesterday and today there has been no image. This is what I see.

Thanks for pointing out the missing image. I will edit the page when I get home from work I am gathering that the text should be replaced by a diagram. I can do that. Give me a day or two to finish. As you may have gathered Web page design is not a strength of mine.

It depends on who your audience is. One thing that might be tricky for some is the jump to mod 2, though I think it’s beautifully motivated by your starting example. You might consider giving Evens and Odds as a commonsense way to think about what mod 2 means.

It probably wouldn’t hurt to dwell a little longer on the fact that your mod 2 arrangement really means that jumps won’t change anything. Some pictures contrasting the earlier example, with just three in a row, would be great, I think.

It’s a nice little problem, by the way. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.