alt Hacker NewsI think this would be extremely valuable: “We need to focus far more energy on understanding and explaining the basic mental infrastructure of mathematics—with consequently less energy on the most recent results.” I’ve long thought that more of us could devout time to serious maths problems if they were written in a language we all understood.
A little off topic perhaps, but out of curiosity - how many of us here have an interest in recreational mathematics? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_mathematics]
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See Brett Victor’s: Kill Math https://worrydream.com/KillMath/
He separates conceptual understanding from notational understanding— pointing out that the interface of using math has a major impact on utility and understanding. For instance, Roman numerals inhibit understanding and utilization of multiplication.
Better notational systems can be designed, he claims.
Yeah, I don't want to be uncharitable, but I've noticed that a lot of stem fields make heavy use of esoteric language and syntax, and I suspect they do so as a means of gatekeeping.
I understand that some degree of formalism is required to enable the sharing of knowledge amongst people across a variety of languages, but sometimes I'll read a white paper and think "wow, this could be written a LOT more simply".
Statistics is a major culprit of this.
> I’ve long thought that more of us could devout time to serious maths problems if they were written in a language we all understood.
That assumes it’s the language that makes it hard to understand serious math problems. That’s partially true (and the reason why mathematicians keep inventing new language), but IMO the complexity of truly understanding large parts of mathematics is intrinsic, not dependent on terminology.
Yes, you can say “A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors” in terms that more people know of, but it would take many pages, and that would make it hard to understand, too.