ℝolliℵg M∀th Thr∑a∂

blegh

oh btw this is the best thing ever: http://sciencevsmagic.net/geo/

^ ruler & compass constructions game

wow what a shitty slate article.

anyone have any good suggestions in philosophy of math btw? i'm tempted to get Corfield's Towards a Philosophy of Real Mathematics, but I doubt I'll really get to reading it carefully.

never really understood the point of that stuff tbh, aside from like water cooler chat

He notes that much of the philosophical depth and richness of contemporary philosophy of physics comes from that field’s engagement with cutting-edge topics in physics—gauge theory, string theory, quantum gravity, etc.—and he suggests that philosophical investigation of, e.g., category theory or algebraic topology might prove equally fruitful.

hard to think of something more pretentious than philosophers talking about category theory

Mathematicians are—as Corfield emphasizes in an interesting series of examples and case studies—pretty good at plausible reasoning. They evaluate the plausibility of conjectures; they argue about whether certain proof-strategies are likely to “pan out”; they discuss the likelihood that specific analogies will turn out to be fruitful. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how they do all this.

lol

reading thurston's geometry & topology of 3-manifolds notes right now, so so good

sterl, the last thing i was read to read/look at in grad school was stewart shapiro's 2006.

by the time i had stopped caring about phil. of math, though, i was really floored by a talk by ken manders about knot theory as a source of examples for philosophy of mathematics. a lot of his older work is on diagrams in geometry, but unfortunately he is apparently a slow one so he hasn't published an inordinate amount - and the book his bio says he's writing is the same one he's been writing for years. still, his stuff seemed so insightful and mathematically realistic, from what i saw.

if you're thinking about reading Corfield, try reading a few reviews of the book first (I have some, er, acquaintance with these).

how gar are you in greek constructions, flopson?

i am stuck on circle packing.

just did the first two on my friend's ipad yesterday. will continue after i finish my analysis assignment

Euler did u write the review i was linking excerpts from above?

that one's not mine, but I know the author very well

corfield took the one you quoted pretty hard though

he was cooler with mine though I think mine's deeper

hard to think of something more pretentious than philosophers talking about category theory

spoken like a person who has never heard category theorists talking about philosophy

thanks for the pointers to the reviews, but they made me want to read corfield more, since i get the sense i'm more sympathetic to the sort of approach he advocates. i've definitely read some mclarty i really like, and have been v. taken by his historical exposition.

any thoughts of/knowledge of john bell btw? i enjoyed his primer on infinitesimal analysis.

also heard him give a good talk, less of a picture of his work, but people who are down with robinson seem good?

the problem with david's approach in the book is that it's too shallow; he just threw quotes out there and expects them to do the philosophical lifting

colin & ken have gone much deeper, but yes, not so much published; and colin is a partisan for cat theory and partisanship of that kind isn't becoming a philosopher

this convo is so weird to me, I come here to talk about rem bootlegs & then there are people talking about my people

what makes you think there's no isomorphism there

april 10 1981 -> the euclidean diagram

terry tao making some interesting points tangential to the whole summing an infinite series debacle https://plus.google.com/114134834346472219368/posts/ZuJDv3daT9n

"colin is a partisan for cat theory and partisanship of that kind isn't becoming a philosopher"

I'm curious about this statement in a number of ways.

A) how is he a partisan for cat theory? partisan in what fashion? to whom? against what?
B) why is partisanship unbecoming for a philosopher? since when? what sorts of partisanship are and are not acceptable? does it depend who you are partisan to, or about what topics?

more generally, i'm not quite sure what constitutes "philosophical lifting"? like what is "deep" philosophy vs not?

i can read mclarty as basically intellectual history with a strong grasp of the concepts under consideration and related debates. in what sense is this or is this not "philosophy"?

intellectual history is important, but ≠ philosophy. philosophy seeks to understand values; in the case of mathematics, mathematical values. you need to do history to bring those values forward, because mathematical practice expresses those values; but describing that history isn't enough

colin is a philosopher though, but rarely in print

yes, being rah rah for category theory isn't philosophical; but articulating what values category-theoretic methods realize could be philosophical. the former ≠ the latter

lol at the idea that sterl is going to accept that intellectual historians do not seek to understand values

describe values, sure, but that leaves the understanding to us. need furthur

still i lol, but then in my experience 'intellectual history' is a label used by boundary-policing philosophers to keep fantasy-land sacrosanct and pure

fantasyland rules, though rip mr toad's wild ride

THERE'S NO PHILOSOPHY IN THE MATH THREAD!

^^ boundary-policing

I liked Terry's post on 1+2+3+4+5+.... by the way

if you don't do your own philosophy they're just going to take it away from you

good understanding of statistics, no understanding of literature

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/2014/01/27/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-flip-coins/

not very good at paying attention during plays either, show some class

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsvy8Ko2-YM

http://users-cs.au.dk/danvy/the-ideal-mathematician.pdf

that rang totally hollow for me for some reason maybe because i am a pure math snob?

How could we as mathematicians prove to a skeptical outsider that our theorems have meaning in the world outside our own fraternity?

why does it matter if they do? most mathematicians pursue math for little monetary award or prestige and they do it for the love of it. and the comparison to scientology in the next paragraph, ffs -_-

i skipped a large part of that though so maybe that qn was answered, can u sum it up for me sterl?

if mathematicians need to get better at explaining Why it is important to study fucked up geometric spaces that don't make any sense in order to get funding, then yeah whatever it takes to keep letting them do that. but like, idk in terms of beauty + ingenuity it's one of the greatest human achievements AND a lot of that weirdo shit ended up explaining all of 20th c physics (and now physics like quantum field theory is just math out the wazoo so there ARE "applications" in terms of understanding the universe) so like just trust them to keep doing cool shit u know?

a lot of this jsut seems like Why It's Sad and Lonely To Be A Mathematician

He finds it diffcult to establish meaningful conversation with that large portion of humanity that has never heard of a non-Riemannian hypersquare. This creates grave diffculties for him; there are two col- leagues in his department, who know something about non-Riemannian hypersquares, but one of them is on sabbatical, and the other is much more interested in non-Eulerian semirings. He goes to conferences, and on summer visits to colleagues, to meet people who talk his language, who can appreciate his work and whose recognition, approval, and ad- miration are the only meaningful rewards he can ever hope for.

the thing about the writing being undecipherable outside of the community it addresses is interesting. my favourite prof talks a lot about it, how, when you're writing something that will be read by your peers, there's a common base of not just knowledge and terminology that you can assume, but also a familiarity with the same methods, similarly to how you might say "by induction on n" or "by a diagonalization argument," just more convoluted and specific. its true that it would be a shame if the meaning of those papers were lost to future generations, but is that really the case?

ok read the whole thing

is it such a big deal that a vast amount of research math is undecipherable to those outside the hyper-specific community when the amount of math written in an accessible way is more than any average person would ever want to read if they lived to be a million years old?

lol which is like, one book of it, if that

yeah, like given the demand for accessible math expo mathematicians have been more forthcoming w/ exposition than is required

that just shows how concerned they are for our true well-being, rather than with our ignorant conceptions of it

heh

i know it's written by mathematicians but the whole thing felt kinda "ppl who work at record stores are such snobs!"

you'll feel it, eventually

for caek:

http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-errors-1.14700#/b2

P values have always had critics. In their almost nine decades of existence, they have been likened to mosquitoes (annoying and impossible to swat away), the emperor's new clothes (fraught with obvious problems that everyone ignores) and the tool of a “sterile intellectual rake” who ravishes science but leaves it with no progeny3. One researcher suggested rechristening the methodology “statistical hypothesis inference testing”3, presumably for the acronym it would yield.