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Some background about the author of this MathOverflow answer: > William Paul Thurston (October 30, 1946 – August 21, 2012) was an American mathematician. He wa
by susam 3y ago
Some background about the author of this MathOverflow answer:
> William Paul Thurston (October 30, 1946 – August 21, 2012) was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thurston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thurston
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoWow so he was 74 when he wrote that answer, and this comment that he followed up with: > I try to write what seems real. By now, I have no cause to fear how I will be judged, which makes it much easier for me.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- susam 3y agoI especially liked this comment that proposed that this answer be called Thurston's Paean: > This seems like an ideal counterpoint to Hardy's Lament. I'm calling it Thurston's Paean :). Seems poignant now that he has passed. -- Suresh Venkat (Aug 22, 2012) I agree. I have now dedicated a page to Thurston's answer at https://susam.net/maze/thurstons-paean.html https://susam.net/maze/thurstons-paean.html hoping that it'll make the term Thurston's Paean slightly more popular.
- jdsalaro 3y agoWe're doing this, aren't we? :) Let's hope the BART and ChatGPT folks crawl it soon enough haha https://jdsalaro.com/bookmark/quote/thurstons-paean/ https://jdsalaro.com/bookmark/quote/thurstons-paean/
- two_handfuls 3y agoForgive the naïve question, but what is Hardy's lament?
- ducttapecrown 3y agoHardy's lament is a short popular essay about how the famous professional mathematician Hardy experiences math as art with the curiosity of a child, and yet the average school math education evokes a prison of rote exercise. It was written in 1940 and I think at some point he says something about number theory being pure math with no applications. Ironically I'm submitting this comment over https so he was wrong about that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Apology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Apology
- MYEUHD 3y ago> Wow so he was 74 when he wrote that answer Actually, he was 64
- arcanemachiner 3y agoThat was just GP honoring the title of the post.
- susam 3y agoWhat do you mean? http://web.archive.org/web/20230718104503/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36744690 http://web.archive.org/web/20230718104503/https://news.ycomb... shows "(2010)" and 2010 - 1946 = 64.
- bobthepanda 3y agoIt’s a joke about the parent comment being bad at math, so maybe they don’t need to contribute
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoYeah, fatigue got the better of me there
- perihelions 3y agoSo, where he writes on StackOverflow - "Is there, for example any real reason that even such famous results as... the Poincaré conjecture, really matter?" He is writing from the perspective of someone who played a key role in solving the Poincaré conjecture. Remarkable context! (Though the word "Poincaré" doesn't technically appear in his Wikipedia biography; it's disguised as "geometrization conjecture").
- fsckboy 3y agoand where he writes "I think of mathematics as having a large component of psychology, because of its strong dependence on human minds. Dehumanized mathematics would be more like computer code, which is very different" he's just blowing smoke. smh so dumb.
- bjornlouser 3y agoMentioned in a comment of that MO question is Thurston's "On proof and progress in mathematics" https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236 https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236