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As a grad student in math I read a lot of lifeless papers. Seeing the exact opposite is fun. I thought it was a good article. Why does math need to avoid breath

by tgb 10y ago

As a grad student in math I read a lot of lifeless papers. Seeing the exact opposite is fun. I thought it was a good article. Why does math need to avoid breathlessness if we seem to embrace it with, say, a million breathless articles about Stephen Curry's latest game? It only seems bad because there's not a culture of excitement over math like there is for basketball, so it stands out. But if we want there to be such a culture, maybe we need to start by taking every bit of excitement we have and stretching it to the fullest.

schoen 10y ago
Martin Gardner was very good at that, and I think Erica Klarreich (one of the main Quanta math journalists and the author of this particular article) is good at it too: she likes to focus on the history and context of a problem, describing mathematicians' expectations and hopes for a solution, and then how progress was made and what consequences it may have. I guess there's some risk that many of these stories fall into similar patterns (something was hard and mathematicians worked on it for a long time, they didn't expect it to be solved soon, now it's been solved solved and people are impressed and see various applications), but it's nice to see the details and hear from some people in the field in their own words. I feel like Klarreich tends to give more details than Gardner did when writing about current research; maybe that partly has to do with the web form, because she can include links to the actual papers and supplementary materials. It's also a nice counterpoint to the enthusiasm that her articles convey because the applications and consequences are specific; it's not like journalism that says "maybe now we'll get a pony/interstellar spaceflight/spooky quantum communications/faster computers!" without really showing how the discovery is going to enable that. The fact is that mathematicians are excited by unexpected progress in math research, so hopefully other people can be too! :-)

by tgb 10y ago

schoen 10y ago

Martin Gardner was very good at that, and I think Erica Klarreich (one of the main Quanta math journalists and the author of this particular article) is good at it too: she likes to focus on the history and context of a problem, describing mathematicians' expectations and hopes for a solution, and then how progress was made and what consequences it may have. I guess there's some risk that many of these stories fall into similar patterns (something was hard and mathematicians worked on it for a long time, they didn't expect it to be solved soon, now it's been solved solved and people are impressed and see various applications), but it's nice to see the details and hear from some people in the field in their own words. I feel like Klarreich tends to give more details than Gardner did when writing about current research; maybe that partly has to do with the web form, because she can include links to the actual papers and supplementary materials. It's also a nice counterpoint to the enthusiasm that her articles convey because the applications and consequences are specific; it's not like journalism that says "maybe now we'll get a pony/interstellar spaceflight/spooky quantum communications/faster computers!" without really showing how the discovery is going to enable that. The fact is that mathematicians are excited by unexpected progress in math research, so hopefully other people can be too! :-)