Welcome to my online book. The idea of collecting concepts in threes has been on my mind since high school. Today I am a college professor at Harrisburg University in Mathematics, Computer and Information Science and my research is the geometry of the brain and how it creates structures for memory and comprehension.
Part of that research is to use the Internet to collect data. I wanted to create a site where anyone could contribute concepts in threes. It’s become a subject matter encyclopedia, a tricyclopedia, a generalist’s playground. Three is the magic number is a phrase often heard, but the magic is how we use tripartioning to completely understand a concept, generate a pattern, and create a memory. This “chunking” of concepts in threes is cross culture.
This website has been collecting data since 1996, and the domain name threes.com was registered in 1998. I started with hand written code much like Yahoo started using forms to collect data by appending flat files in Perl using cgi. I then migrated to different open source packages where the content is in a database and I have settled on WordPress as the CMS. The data has been through many forms, sometimes embellished, sometimes combined into larger articles, and sometimes lost or removed.
Today the main URL is BookofThrees.com and threes.com is mirrored. Wikipedia has this site listed as an external link reference at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3. The very first hyperlink contributed through a form was by Dr. John A. McNulty linking to his amazing list of human bones in threes at http://www.meddean.luc.edu/lumen/MedEd/GrossAnatomy/Threes.html. The list is continually updated. The link at the BookofThrees is https://www.bookofthrees.com/list-of-threes-in-anatomy/.
The site has always been free to browse and search and is non profit. There are around four thousand articles to date. At the bottom of each article there are related articles to continue your query. I find the research fulfilling and thank those who have read, commented and contributed all these years. I’ve met fascinating people from around the world with the same interest, obsession, passion, all of the above. Thank you for browsing the site! Please contact me with any questions, comments or concerns at admin@bookofthrees.com.
