ℝolliℵg M∀th Thr∑a∂

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

Interesting article about the Stanford mathematician who just won the Fields Medal:

http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-tenacious-explorer-of-abstract-surfaces/

This thread is impossible to search for, btw.

So how did you find?

articles on all of the winners are super interesting.

I ended up searching within posts for some mathematical terms such as "topology". Kinda inefficient though. xp

(oddly the R in Rolling has never rendered correctly on my linux laptop, everything else was ok, but the R was just doing the rectangle thing. until tonight that is. it's fine now.)

Rolliag Mallth thrsad

for the layperson obv. but i dug this dynamics-explained bit in slate
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/do_the_math/2014/08/maryam_mirzakhani_fields_medal_first_woman_to_win_math_s_biggest_prize_works.html

go stanford, go Iranian Americans!

i was just thinking about if you knew or had met her

wondering

but yeah, it's really cool

unfortunately not ... i was in school of (math and science) education and my wife in nat'l literatures, so i never met anybody in the math dept proper

would love to though!

also note not only first woman winner, but an indian and a brazilian winner, and also the Nevanlinna prize won by an indian. the simons article on that one particularly deep on the maths: http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-grand-vision-for-the-impossible/

also rumors that they may change fields medal qualifications in terms of age a bit, which is exciting too, since the limit + the quadrennial awards mean lots of ppl slip thru the cracks

in other news, i'm scarily close to putting together a first-pass understanding of sheaves (and maybe even stacks)

Pls to xplain to the rest of us.

This thread is still impossible to search for. I ended up searching for “homotopy.” It wasn’t the first result!

Why not search for "Dedekind"?

Just saw sheaves mentioned in Love & Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality, by Edward Frenkel.