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A genuine breakthrough in the narrow realm of reverse mathematics. (The article exagerates that into a breakthrough in general, par for the course for science

by xamuel 9y ago

A genuine breakthrough in the narrow realm of reverse mathematics. (The article exagerates that into a breakthrough in general, par for the course for science journalism.) Here's the actual paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.00050.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.00050.pdf The quantamagazine article puts a lot of emphasis on the youth (34 and 27) of the researchers. I guess the journalist overlooked a more surprising age. Lu "Jiayi" Liu (whom the article briefly mentions for a preliminary result) was I think 20 years old when he made his discovery in 2012 which was a tentative step toward the stronger result in this article. I saw Liu give a talk and it was remarkable. It was in a conference where all the other speakers were very well-established logicians with many decades in the field, and then this Chinese undergrad who was probably the youngest person in the whole building... and all these well-established logicians were humbled by him.

Sniffnoy 9y ago
A note -- if you're linking to arXiv, it's better to link to the abstract (https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.00050 https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.00050) rather than directly to the PDF. From the abstract, one can easily click through to the PDF; not so the reverse. And the abstract allows one to do things like see different versions of the paper, search for other things by the same authors, etc. Thank you!
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > not so the reverse That big grey text on the right of each arxiv paper is actually a link you can click form the pdf. Took make like N->\inf years to figure that out... I used to complain about how heavy pdf docs are and therefore preferred websites that contained some metadata with a link to actual content, but websites these days... and at least the .pdf honestly downloads on anroid/iPhone, which are the only two platforms where I honestly care about bandwidth (and even then...)

by xamuel 9y ago

Sniffnoy 9y ago

A note -- if you're linking to arXiv, it's better to link to the abstract (https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.00050 https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.00050) rather than directly to the PDF. From the abstract, one can easily click through to the PDF; not so the reverse. And the abstract allows one to do things like see different versions of the paper, search for other things by the same authors, etc. Thank you!

throwawayjava 9y ago
> not so the reverse That big grey text on the right of each arxiv paper is actually a link you can click form the pdf. Took make like N->\inf years to figure that out... I used to complain about how heavy pdf docs are and therefore preferred websites that contained some metadata with a link to actual content, but websites these days... and at least the .pdf honestly downloads on anroid/iPhone, which are the only two platforms where I honestly care about bandwidth (and even then...)