3 ms·

I am reminded of the recent obituary of Grothendieck: http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendieck.html http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumfor

I am reminded of the recent obituary of Grothendieck: http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendieck.html http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendie... Two extremely well-known mathematicians were asked by Nature to write an obituary for the late Grothendieck. They wrote it to be mostly understood by a nonmathematical audience, but Nature ultimately rejected the obituary on it being too technical. It is almost as if each discipline has become an island. When I submit a math paper, I do not at all imagine a nonmathematician will read it. But then again, I also do not write it so that nonmathematicians could read it. I suspect this is largely the same across different fields. I'm also not certain if this is necessarily bad; it would be tremendously hard and time-consuming to make each article understandable to another field. Or maybe this is precisely the problem?

yodsanklai 12y ago
> it would be tremendously hard and time-consuming to make each article understandable to another field. You can't explain something that required years of thinking and learning to a non expert that has only a few minutes to spend. It's not the role of a research publication.
- tormeh 12y ago
  But what if I have a day? Can you help me then? Many papers are a team effort to understand, even for students in the relevant field. No excuses.
jeffreyrogers 12y ago
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics does a pretty good job of explaining math to non-mathematicians, however, I expect that it was a huge undertaking and benefited from having excellent editors. Of course, you lose some rigor in doing this, but the central ideas are still intact (as far as I can tell) and it gives better intuition for those new to the field of study in question than a fully rigorous, technical approach would.
Xcelerate 12y ago
Haha, that obituary is kind of funny. I do graduate level research in quantum chemistry, and I still didn't understand most of what they were talking about. Then again, maybe that says more about me than their ability to communicate to non-mathematicians.

yodsanklai 12y ago

> it would be tremendously hard and time-consuming to make each article understandable to another field. You can't explain something that required years of thinking and learning to a non expert that has only a few minutes to spend. It's not the role of a research publication.

tormeh 12y ago
But what if I have a day? Can you help me then? Many papers are a team effort to understand, even for students in the relevant field. No excuses.

jeffreyrogers 12y ago

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics does a pretty good job of explaining math to non-mathematicians, however, I expect that it was a huge undertaking and benefited from having excellent editors. Of course, you lose some rigor in doing this, but the central ideas are still intact (as far as I can tell) and it gives better intuition for those new to the field of study in question than a fully rigorous, technical approach would.

Xcelerate 12y ago

Haha, that obituary is kind of funny. I do graduate level research in quantum chemistry, and I still didn't understand most of what they were talking about. Then again, maybe that says more about me than their ability to communicate to non-mathematicians.