ℝolliℵg M∀th Thr∑a∂

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.

Guys, come participate on my new thread: Math & Music: The Severed Alliance. Some Recent Academic Approaches (Do Not Read If You Hate Drums)

they're crowdfunding a translation of the grothendieck biography

http://www.gofundme.com/7ldiwo

(i bought vol 1 i think, and skimmed it, and it left off before the math got interesting.)

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11326

Snide reviews form part of the folklore of Mathematical Reviews. The most famous one is as sublimely succinct as it is damning: “This paper fills a much needed gap in the literature.”

I review for Math Reviews (as do others ILXors I expect) and I have yet to make a joke, alas. I just say what the paper does and get on with it. My reviews in philo journals are much more critical though I think I've never gone for a lol in one of those either.

on the philo math tip, attended a v. nice lecture by jean-pierre marquis that discussed notions of abstraction in mathematics, and frege's (i guess?) notion of a criterion of identity.

variations on "this paper fill a much-needed gap in the literature" are code for "this is an insignificant paper" in other fields too ime

Remember the relevant bit of verbiage in Lucky Jim?

"In considering this strangely neglected topic," it began. This what neglected topic ? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what?

now here's a paper title for the ages! http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.0799

Madame BovaryNed Raggett, c'est moi.

Ha, wrong thread.

so wow i now have an intuition for (co)homology, finally! that took forever.

i still can't crunch out calcs with it, but i get what the chain condition is about, how it relates to "the boundary of the boundary is zero" and i'm now familiar with a few different versions of chain/cochain complexes, how short sequences become long ones, and why "exactness" matters. oh and how this relates in some sense to de rahm's theorem!

thus resolves what is probably my longest period between hearing a word and being able to even describe what it means in vague handwavy terms.

any actuaries in the building? i once did interesting math...

every time i want to find this thread i just search for 'grothendieck'

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/us/math-under-common-core-has-even-parents-stumbling.html

Laci Maniscalco, a third-grade teacher in Lafayette, La., who said that sometimes her students cried during the past year when working on problems under the new curriculum, said she had seen genuine progress in their understanding — and in her own, as well.

crying, that's how you know it's working right

seven and eight year olds crying during school? this new phenomenon must be investigated!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wHDn8LDks8

http://cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk/illogic/illogic-web.pdf