> If I have not found any references, it’s doubtless because I’m not looking in the right places. This is one increasingly frustrating aspect of math and so-ca

> If I have not found any references, it’s doubtless because I’m not looking in the right places. This is one increasingly frustrating aspect of math and so-called hard sciences in general: there is an explosion of content since - say - the 18th century that it has become increasingly hard to actually find if and where there exists published work on a specific topic. Google is of course a tremendous help, but: a) the web has not yet absorbed all scientific literature: between walled gardens and stuff that hasn't been scanned yet, content is still hard to get to or even index b) different scientific fields are often busy re-inventing the wheel, assigning their own jargon to the same underlying concepts, leading to a rather confusing landscape. In the "old days", we had librarians, folks who could guide you towards that elusive piece of knowledge you desperately needed. Wishful thinking: I believe a new academic discipline to classify, organize and index scientific knowledge (I'm aware of existing systems - they are lacking, as exemplified by this article), including missionary-style undertaking to try and convince different branch of sciences to gently and slowly converge towards a uniform language for scientific knowledge.