3 ms·

The article links to a series of letters between Fermat, Pascal, and Carcavi which are wonderfully intelligent and readable, while also deeply kind and personal

The article links to a series of letters between Fermat, Pascal, and Carcavi which are wonderfully intelligent and readable, while also deeply kind and personal. > 1. I have been delighted to have had the thoughts conformed to those of M. Pascal, for I admire infinitely his genius and I believe him very capable of coming to the end of all that which he will undertake. The friendship that he offers me is so dear to me and so considerable that I must have no difficulty in making some use of it in the publishing of my Treatises. > Our blows always continue and I am as glad as you in the admiration that our thoughts are arranged so exactly that it seems that they have taken one same route and make one same path It makes me wonder if future generations will look back on correspondences between guys like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. https://probabilityandfinance.com/pulskamp/Pascal/Sources/pasfer.pdf https://probabilityandfinance.com/pulskamp/Pascal/Sources/pa...

decremental 6mo ago
[dead]
divbzero 6mo ago
Perhaps future generations will reference certain threads here on HN.
- mswphd 6mo ago
  This does happen some on other websites. I've often seen people in math discuss things that Bill Thurston (a fields medalist) has posted on mathoverflow https://mathoverflow.net/users/9062/bill-thurston https://mathoverflow.net/users/9062/bill-thurston note that he has been deceased for nearly 15 years now.
  - mcontrac 6mo ago
    Math is particularly nice in that whole papers can be discussed/compressed into a single conversation, unlike, a scientific experiment which requires many figures and controls to confirm or deny one's hypothesis. It's why teatime culture is so great in academic math departments worldwide. I'd listen in at my undergrad institution and usually a single conversation between two professors at teatime could be written up into a paper if they really wanted to. During undergrad I was mentored by one of Bill's students, and he'd often comment that Bill's glib throwaways would usually be very profound if you thought through it carefully.
- fakedang 6mo ago
  We're already referencing the Dropbox antagonist whenever we can.
mswphd 6mo ago
In math, Grothendieck's correspondences are quite famous. Here's a book that is entirely 300 pages of letters between him and J.P. Serre https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircle/Letters/GS.pdf https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircl... There are many others for Grothendieck though. Another example is how Godel wrote a letter to Von Neumann towards the end of his life. This letter contained, among other things, the (now very funny) question of whether a certain NP complete problem may be solvable in quadratic time. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/15455-s17/hartmanis-on-godel-von-neumann.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/15455-s17/hartmanis-on-gode... Practically though, modern correspondence is often through a disjoint set of technologies, that (importantly) someone cleaning up the estate of a deceased person does not necessarily have access to. So it seems unlikely we'll get this kind of insight going forward (with notable exceptions, for example the Epstein emails).
Natsu 6mo ago
> It makes me wonder if future generations will look back on correspondences between guys like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. We kinda had that, on Usenet, before spammers flooded it to death.
Xmd5a 6mo ago
> I have not time to send you the demonstration of a difficulty which greatly astonished M. de Mere, for he has a very good mind, but he is not a geometer (this is, as you know, a great defect) and he does not even understand that a mathematical line is divisible to infinity and believes very well to understand that it is composed of points in finite number, and never have I been able to pull him from it. If you could do that, one would render him perfect.

decremental 6mo ago

[dead]

divbzero 6mo ago

Perhaps future generations will reference certain threads here on HN.

mswphd 6mo ago
This does happen some on other websites. I've often seen people in math discuss things that Bill Thurston (a fields medalist) has posted on mathoverflow https://mathoverflow.net/users/9062/bill-thurston https://mathoverflow.net/users/9062/bill-thurston note that he has been deceased for nearly 15 years now.
- mcontrac 6mo ago
  Math is particularly nice in that whole papers can be discussed/compressed into a single conversation, unlike, a scientific experiment which requires many figures and controls to confirm or deny one's hypothesis. It's why teatime culture is so great in academic math departments worldwide. I'd listen in at my undergrad institution and usually a single conversation between two professors at teatime could be written up into a paper if they really wanted to. During undergrad I was mentored by one of Bill's students, and he'd often comment that Bill's glib throwaways would usually be very profound if you thought through it carefully.
fakedang 6mo ago
We're already referencing the Dropbox antagonist whenever we can.

mswphd 6mo ago

In math, Grothendieck's correspondences are quite famous. Here's a book that is entirely 300 pages of letters between him and J.P. Serre https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircle/Letters/GS.pdf https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircl... There are many others for Grothendieck though. Another example is how Godel wrote a letter to Von Neumann towards the end of his life. This letter contained, among other things, the (now very funny) question of whether a certain NP complete problem may be solvable in quadratic time. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/15455-s17/hartmanis-on-godel-von-neumann.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/15455-s17/hartmanis-on-gode... Practically though, modern correspondence is often through a disjoint set of technologies, that (importantly) someone cleaning up the estate of a deceased person does not necessarily have access to. So it seems unlikely we'll get this kind of insight going forward (with notable exceptions, for example the Epstein emails).

Natsu 6mo ago

> It makes me wonder if future generations will look back on correspondences between guys like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. We kinda had that, on Usenet, before spammers flooded it to death.

Xmd5a 6mo ago

> I have not time to send you the demonstration of a difficulty which greatly astonished M. de Mere, for he has a very good mind, but he is not a geometer (this is, as you know, a great defect) and he does not even understand that a mathematical line is divisible to infinity and believes very well to understand that it is composed of points in finite number, and never have I been able to pull him from it. If you could do that, one would render him perfect.