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> Gödel did not explain how he found his solution, but there are in fact many possible derivations Wondering as an outsider, do mathematicians like to present
by dgs_sgd 4y ago
> Gödel did not explain how he found his solution, but there are in fact many possible derivations
Wondering as an outsider, do mathematicians like to present results and leave people guessing how they arrived at them? Reminds of the "left as an exercise to the reader" meme.
- ur-whale 4y ago> mathematicians like to present results and leave people guessing how they arrived at them? I don't think that's the case, but I think many of them totally underestimate the actual pedagogic value of taking the time to do that. Many complex or non-intuitive "discoveries" in math are much easier to understand if you retrace the footsteps of the person who first got there.
- coutego 4y agoYes, there is such tradition. I remember one of my maths professors at the uni 25 years ago complaining about "those people that "use a model to develop their results and then hide the model when publishing them". I think that there are multiple reasons, not only trying to be "fancier". One important one is of presentation style. Some traditions (for example, Bourbaki) insist in conceptual purity and minimalism, presenting the most abstract concepts in its distiled form. Hiding "unnecessary" details is an objective on its own in that tradition.