Oh, I wasn't accusing you of using jargon for jargon's sake, and nor do I believe that you were -- you used the appropriate jargon appropriately and correctly!

Oh, I wasn't accusing you of using jargon for jargon's sake, and nor do I believe that you were -- you used the appropriate jargon appropriately and correctly! And certainly representing graphs as matrices and then applying matrix math to them is valuable, I am absolutely not arguing against that. I'm just taking issue with the (probably tongue-in-cheek!) framing of your "quick sketch": rather than merely demonstrate the connection ("hey look, PageRank uses this stuff!"), the sketch implied that if one knew theory about graphs and their representation as matrices, then PageRank is pretty obvious and falls out of the math (and then you could start a US$trillions business!). I was content to just leave it at that with a snarky version of "hey, sure, this math is relevant, but it wasn't a requirement to come up with the PageRank insight" -- but then I got triggered by your "anti-intellectual" comment. :) So now I feel compelled to say, in case any impressionable young minds read this thread: that sketch (which I likely grossly misrepresented above) is a fantasy portrayal of how the insights behind technologies like PageRank come about; matrix knowledge isn't necessary (but not unhelpful, of course) to create PageRank or similar things. I've met too many (not necessarily you!) who tell themselves some version of this story: "PageRank? That's just the largest eigenvector the edge matrix" followed by some variant of "Those guys just got lucky! / Those guys just commercialized some known math! / I do math, and math can be worth billions!" That story ignores the actual insights required to get to PageRank, even if you already know the theory; it ignores the hard work of actually building a company and commercializing such an insight. Anyway, thanks for coming to my therapy session. </soapbox>