alt Hacker NewsFriendly warning to those who might not be aware: the vast majority of comments below posts like the above will be left by (otherwise intelligent) programmers who think mathematics is a closed system where one attempts to solve endless Olympiad-type problems. I wouldn’t take any of it seriously at all. Better to listen to what those who actually know what the subject is about have to say.
Unfortunately, mathematics (especially pure mathematics) is by its very nature very, very poorly understood by those who haven’t worked as a mathematician. Even worse, those who don’t understand are seemingly not at all aware of their misunderstanding and are entirely confident in their (very wrong) characterisation of the subject.
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Could you clue us in? What is mathematics actually about?
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A lot of programmers consider themselves to be applied mathematicians.
Maybe more in years past when Comp Sci was a subset of Math Departments.
I did systems administration for a university math department for several years. I came to the conclusion that mathematics (and perhaps philosophy) were both topics where it was likely that no staff members in that department could describe "what goes on here" and that possibly even within the department, one professor may not be able to describe what another professor's actually doing.
The closest I could come to describing math is "some abstract process where imagined structures are characterized and extended; the most critical part of the process is identifying where seemingly independent structures are found to actually be fungible in some previously undiscovered way".
A simple example is