alt Hacker News>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol
compare to
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rees_algebra
Most people, especially non-tech technical people, could crash through the TCP article and come out the other side with at least a high level understanding of it.
Most people, even technical ones, could not even get through the first line of the rees article, heck the first statement of the article. And then if they try, they need to know about algebraic rings. And digging into rings becomes totally intractable. None of the words or symbols in any of the articles track to anything even many technical people can grab onto. And this pattern is all over the place in mathematics.
It's not about mastering the difficulty of a topic or it's relative depth, it's about how abstract and removed from anything tangible it is. Anything with math it is always seemingly impossible to get a foothold on the idea anywhere within 10 degrees of explanation. Hell you cannot even clearly understand the problem that is being solved, or anything within 10 degrees of that.
Replies
> Most people, especially non-tech technical people, could crash through the TCP article and come out the other side with at least a high level understanding of it.
Careful, I think you might be committing an https://xkcd.com/2501/ error.
What even is a protocol? What is a host? What is a ‘stream of octets’? Wiki helpfully tells you octets are also known as ‘bytes’.
"The Rees algebra is an algebra over Z[t^−1]"
Such a small sentence and yet it means very little to me. I understand some constituent pieces, but I don't understand what Z is here other than a 'ring' and I don't really grasp how t^-1 converts this into a generalized family of algebra. It would take me a lot of effort to understand this and use it practically. I find that fascinating because it really is such a small statement that seems perfectly cromulent, but there's a lot packed in there that someone like me is totally missing.
I suppose there may be similar concepts in computer science, but nothing comes to mind that ever stumped me. To be frank, the field has been relatively accessible to me because it hasn't been too challenging. Not sure if that's a personal aptitude thing or it is genuinely simpler.
You are comparing TCP a relatively basic topic in the grand scheme of computing with Rees_algebra which is fairly specialized, we could take a simpler topic more foundational and clearer to understand and compare them.
I can understand that this feels like one is so much more complicated part of it is also how the articles were written, wikipedia is not known for quality maths explanations.
But beyond that this comparison to me feels unfair.
Let's take Euclidean algorithm or just modular arthimetic for example what a lot of computing even is based on I feel like that's a fairer comparison. No?
Perhaps that's too easy but I just find this specific comparison very unfair to both Math's intuitive-ness and Computing's complexity. Perhaps I am the one being delusional.
Definitely agreed. I have a bachelor's in math and took an abstract algebra course as part of it. I also took a couple computer science courses in college and work as a data engineer. My only real exposure to networking is from an AWS cert I did years ago.
I can tease apart the Rees Algebra article one bit of half remembered terminology at a time and come out of it feeling like I just barely understand what the topic even is.
I can read the TCP article and feel like I have a thorough overview of the topic and could explain it at a high level to someone else.