5 ms·
Absolutely. It's a problem with academia in general. Academics don't get rewarded for explaining things in an easy to understand way. Moreover, it is often a h
by mathgenius 7y ago
Absolutely.
It's a problem with academia in general. Academics don't get rewarded for explaining things in an easy to understand way. Moreover, it is often a huge amount of work to distill results down like this. And if you succeed the response you may get is "well that is obvious".
Anyway, this is my counter argument to the "formalization of mathematics": why don't we incentivize people to bring some clarity to the exposition? If mathematics is suffering from faulty proofs, then I have little sympathy. Make it simpler, organize the concepts. Muscular calculations only go so far.
- ncmncm 7y agoIn other fields, writing survey articles is (or was, recently) an appreciated activity. Survey articles are explicitly supposed to bring people up on the important results and current state of a subject.
- skela224 7y agoThere's the idea that pure math papers should not have a "Conclusion" section, where the author summarizes what has been done and says a few informal words. This doesn't seem to help the exposition but is nonetheless prevalent: if you haven't paid attention to the proofs and derivation, they aren't going to retell what happened in plain plain language. e.g. look at this advice from the academia stackexchange, to a young aspiring mathematician: "If you're relatively young and inexperienced and hoping for best results on the rapid publication of your work in strong journals, I would stick pretty mercilessly to the format: (i) strong introduction motivating your work and explaining clearly the value added both in the results themselves and the techniques of proof and (ii) the rest of the paper contains careful proofs of all the results, in a very clear, linear, easy to follow fashion, e.g. "Section A.B: Proof of Lemma C".