A map of principles & history

From 1 + 1 to Attention

A red-paperclip trade-up through the history of mathematics. Start at addition — the trinket anyone can hold — and arrive, one small step at a time, at every part of Figure 1 of “Attention Is All You Need” and how they fit together to make language out of arithmetic. No leaps. Each stop is reachable from the one before it.

Each box is one small step — hover to light its path, click to expand the full card: the idea, who found it, what it’s doing inside the machine, and which piece of Figure 1 it unlocks. All lines merge at the gold terminus — the Transformer. Read top → down: antiquity at the top, 2017 at the bottom. Dig deeper — the full LADDER curriculum →