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If you were to start a blog where you provide links to your papers (when allowable) along with synopses for those of us with only an engineering-level math back

If you were to start a blog where you provide links to your papers (when allowable) along with synopses for those of us with only an engineering-level math background, you might be pleasantly surprised at how much interest your work attracts--particularly on places like HN. Please let us know if you decide to do so, and I'll be sure to bookmark you.

kragen 15y ago
If you have only an engineering-level math background, the blog will have to explain what a field is, what a cubic field is, and what a discriminant (of a field) is, in every post. And it will have to do it briefly enough that you stay interested, and accurately enough that what follows is meaningful. This sounds to me like an impossible task. Mathematicians do have the advantage that all their papers are open-access. If you're interested in math, you can cruise on over to arXiv and read 60 abstracts an hour.
- pessimizer 15y ago
  "[...]the blog will have to explain what a field is, what a cubic field is, and what a discriminant (of a field) is, in every post." At most once. Links are what the internet is for:)
  - kragen 15y ago
    Moving the explanations out of the blog posts into a separate page or pages makes the problem harder, not easier, because it keeps you from omitting parts of the background that aren't necessary to understand the relevance of some particular result. If you want links, here they are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(mathematics)#Definition_and_illustration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(mathematics)#Definition_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discriminant_of_an_algebraic_number_field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discriminant_of_an_algebraic_nu... The thing is, those articles probably aren't brief enough for many people to stay interested, and they probably also don't go deep enough to make any particular one of impendia's results comprehensible. (And I'm also not sure if they're readable to people with only an engineering background in math.) (In case you think I'm being snooty about engineers, I dropped out of college and have never published a theorem; instead, I have made my living writing software.)
    - pessimizer 15y ago
      Many people wouldn't stay interested; I'd say the vast majority wouldn't. But, after explaining those things to the extent that you thought was worthwhile, you ended up with 100 long term readers out of the x billion on the internet, I'd count that as a huge win, myself.
- kevinskii 15y ago
  If the goal were to make it so the layperson could read and understand the paper itself, then yes, that may well be an impossible task. But the OP's goal is simply to increase interest in his own work. Recurring concepts could be explained once somewhere and referred back to as needed, and the research and its implications could be elaborated on in far more detail than that given in the abstracts. This should not only be possible, but would likely be quite successful.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
pnathan 15y ago
HN is a highly atypical community. People here usually care about learning. In my math classes, the engineers were the biggest whiners regarding mathematics. "I don't care about meanings, just tell me what function on my calculator to hit". I've tried to read Terry Tao's blog; I like more advanced mathematics. His blog is very interesting, I'm sure, but the jargon level is so far beyond my knowledge it might as well be Russian for the level of meaning I draw from it.

kragen 15y ago

If you have only an engineering-level math background, the blog will have to explain what a field is, what a cubic field is, and what a discriminant (of a field) is, in every post. And it will have to do it briefly enough that you stay interested, and accurately enough that what follows is meaningful. This sounds to me like an impossible task. Mathematicians do have the advantage that all their papers are open-access. If you're interested in math, you can cruise on over to arXiv and read 60 abstracts an hour.

pessimizer 15y ago
"[...]the blog will have to explain what a field is, what a cubic field is, and what a discriminant (of a field) is, in every post." At most once. Links are what the internet is for:)
- kragen 15y ago
  Moving the explanations out of the blog posts into a separate page or pages makes the problem harder, not easier, because it keeps you from omitting parts of the background that aren't necessary to understand the relevance of some particular result. If you want links, here they are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(mathematics)#Definition_and_illustration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(mathematics)#Definition_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discriminant_of_an_algebraic_number_field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discriminant_of_an_algebraic_nu... The thing is, those articles probably aren't brief enough for many people to stay interested, and they probably also don't go deep enough to make any particular one of impendia's results comprehensible. (And I'm also not sure if they're readable to people with only an engineering background in math.) (In case you think I'm being snooty about engineers, I dropped out of college and have never published a theorem; instead, I have made my living writing software.)
  - pessimizer 15y ago
    Many people wouldn't stay interested; I'd say the vast majority wouldn't. But, after explaining those things to the extent that you thought was worthwhile, you ended up with 100 long term readers out of the x billion on the internet, I'd count that as a huge win, myself.
kevinskii 15y ago
If the goal were to make it so the layperson could read and understand the paper itself, then yes, that may well be an impossible task. But the OP's goal is simply to increase interest in his own work. Recurring concepts could be explained once somewhere and referred back to as needed, and the research and its implications could be elaborated on in far more detail than that given in the abstracts. This should not only be possible, but would likely be quite successful.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

pnathan 15y ago

HN is a highly atypical community. People here usually care about learning. In my math classes, the engineers were the biggest whiners regarding mathematics. "I don't care about meanings, just tell me what function on my calculator to hit". I've tried to read Terry Tao's blog; I like more advanced mathematics. His blog is very interesting, I'm sure, but the jargon level is so far beyond my knowledge it might as well be Russian for the level of meaning I draw from it.