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Amateur Mathematician Finds Smallest Universal Cover
- Smaug123 8y ago(Previously posted by you? two days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18460853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18460853)
- tekkk 8y agoQuite frustrating to see the same stories pop up twice while many good new stories go unseen.
- LudwigNagasena 8y ago>He received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Glasgow. The title looks a bit misleading.
- falsedan 8y ago‘amatur’ In the sense of a person undertaking work without being paid for it; like how Olympic atheletes traditionally were non-professionals (not being paid to be atheletes as their career). ‘Amatuer’ is sometimes used as an epithet to mean ‘novice/untrained’, but in mathematics the usual term is ‘lay’.
- throwawaymath 8y agoThe title was litigated when this was posted just a few days ago. "Amateur" does not mean untrained. It means non-professional.
- LudwigNagasena 8y agoAmateur has obvious connotations of the lack of formal training. I agree that the title is not wrong, but it is misleading.
- nixpulvis 8y ago> Gibbs remained interested in academic questions, but there wasn’t much he could do as a nonprofessional researcher. “As an independent scientist it’s hard to keep up with everything that’s going on,” he said. “But if you find the right kind of niche, you can do some stuff and come up with some useful results.” Amateur seem accurate, and relevant.
- glatteis 8y agoThe misleading part is the word "smallest". For me that means he has proven that there exists no smaller cover. In the article, it means "smallest known".
- wallstquant 8y ago“Out of practice mathematician finds smaller universal cover”