5 ms·
Didn't look too deep into the paper but can I just say that I LOVE this style of academic writing? Accessible, full of examples, and in a conversing tone. Most
by pkoird 3y ago
Didn't look too deep into the paper but can I just say that I LOVE this style of academic writing? Accessible, full of examples, and in a conversing tone. Most of the math papers I come across jump right into the "Let $X \in F be ring of S^1$ and etc. I secretly believe that people heap abstractions after abstractions to purposefully shield the fact that the meat of what they've written is actually quite simple. Either that, or I've failed to understand that some ideas can't just be explained without invoking arcane symbols.
- nathan_compton 3y ago> secretly believe Apparently not so secretly.
- sublinear 3y ago> I secretly believe that people heap abstractions after abstractions to purposefully shield the fact that the meat of what they've written is actually quite simple. It usually is pretty simple, but what they're going for is rigor and concision. Maybe a few papers are overconstrained and could drop a few unnecessary details, but I don't think that's all that common after enough review.
- cinntaile 3y agoSometimes people just want their work to sound more impressive than it actually is. Using in-words is a pretty standard technique, their peers don't mind because they speak the same language. To outsiders it sounds difficult. Quite common in academia.
- l33t233372 3y agoI think it’s just that what’s being talked about is so precise and so deep in the weeds of nested definitions that you generally need to talk like that, or at least you have to be a truly gifted communicator to write a math paper without it.
- mathisfun123 3y ago>or at least you have to be a truly gifted communicator to write a math paper without it. i know a lot of math (hence the name) - basically lots of stuff scattered around analysis, geometry, and complexity theory, at varying levels between senior undergrad and research level (MIP and SAT and SMT). this basically tracks my academic progression (from math undergrad to cs phd student). the stuff that i can explain the best is the research level stuff. why? because i can explain it in the same relatable terms that i learned it through, since i learned it when i needed it - through relatable examples that clearly motivate the ideas. i've done it many times - often a junior phd student will ask me what i work on and i start telling a story that starts with some really common thing that gives a foothold ("how would you figure out which variables in a for loop are reused") and then step by step you "follow your nose" to the ideas behind the proofs and techniques and etc. what's my point? lots of academic math is useless frippery that couldn't be motivated in this way and so it can't be articulated except formally.
- l33t233372 3y agoIf you want to explain something in a loose fashion, that works. It doesn’t work so much for proofs in a lot of mathematics, especially because the “common ground” you speak pf starting at would be hours of explanation behind what you’re trying to say.
- celrod 3y agoAs a grad student, one of my more cynical professors said that to write a paper, you take a simple idea and then obfuscate it until it sounds complicated, and therefore seems impressive. He also said the hardest part of reading papers is understanding the notation (thanks to that obfuscation).
- inopinatus 3y agoIf the whole academic career doesn't work out, patent drafting offers an even more baroque application of obfuscated writing skills.
- seanhunter 3y agoNow the whole journey of Einstein from patent examiner to physics superstar makes sense to me.
- bl0rg 3y agoHe simply did not have the intellectual aptitude required for the patent business. Suddenly I don't feel so bad about becoming a math professor after failing accounting school.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tough 3y agoHe saw so many bad ideas on his patent job that he had some good ones of his own
- JamesLeonis 3y agoNow I am imagining Einstein inventing general relativity as a shorthand to deny yet another perpetual motion machine patent.
- 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- akasakahakada 3y agoRead a paper with few hundreds of cites. They proposed a new algorithm to solve eigenvalue problem. I look at it, decrypt the equations, and then notice that it is just basically a bunch of if-then condition like this: count = 0 for x in list: if x == 1: count +=1 if count != 0: return 3 else: return 1 Everything is simple, they try too hard to make things look mathematically rigorous but turn out stupid. if you want to see how cryptic it is: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.07510 https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.07510
- elcritch 3y agoThat doesn't look to try to solve the eigenvalue problem.
- throw_pm23 3y agoBelieve it or not, the "Let $X \in F$..." style is typically easier and more straightforward to write for mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists and closer to how they have the solution in their head (or on scraps of paper) anyway. The problem is, unless the result is super important, that style will get your paper rejected as it doesn't engage the reviewers who are not already familiar with the problem. So authors go instead for the conversational tone and try to find a good story, which is more often what actually shields that the work is quite simple or less important.
- yakubin 3y agoIt’s also easier to spot errors in that style than in prose.
- nabla9 3y agoThat's because the second author is Jeffrey Ullman (Turing Award, Neumann medal) Ullman is of the authors of several legendary computer science books Dragon Book (Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools) the Cinderella Book (Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation), Green Dragon Book (Principles of Compiler Design) If you want to learn deep stuff with clarity, those old books are still the way to go.