Timeline for "Interesting" properties of sets of natural numbers
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 9, 2010 at 8:48 | comment | added | Hans-Peter Stricker | @FGD: I'll accept your advice. Thank you. | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 20:21 | comment | added | François G. Dorais | @Pete: I'm not actually upset, at you or anyone else, though I think this is unfortunate for Hans. There are plenty of poorly formulated questions on MO. This one was actually not so bad, though it suffers from Hans's tendency to use intensional adjectives such as "natural" and "interesting," which could be avoided. (@Hans: I think this would be a good way to avoid such reactions since people tend to interpret these words subjectively.) | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 20:07 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | ...To see that I am not the only one who missed the right interpretation, notice that JDH (who is a very sharp set theorist and logician!) and Gerald Edgar (a veteran mathematician) gave responses that seem to have missed the intended point as well. One of the dangers of too many "vague" questions is that it makes MO readers more likely to (sometimes mistakenly) put questions into the vague category. | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 20:05 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | @FGD: Please don't be upset. I'm glad you found something in the question worthy of response, and I think your response is valuable. (I voted it up.) When I looked back at the question, I can see a connection between it and your answer, and I agree that I was overly hasty. However, that doesn't mean that the question is well-phrased. The question should be something like "Is there an analogue of descriptive set theory for subsets of the natural numbers?"... | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 19:52 | comment | added | François G. Dorais | Although Hans has a track record of asking vague and speculative questions, this is not one of them. Part (a) is perfectly meaningful and it has a definite answer. Also, Hans was right about (b), namely this is indeed the main obstruction. I'm very upset by this hasty community reaction. Lets give Hans a chance! | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 19:43 | answer | added | François G. Dorais | timeline score: 14 | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 19:07 | comment | added | Ian Durham | @Hans: I was going to add "vague" but it didn't sound right. What I meant was that there are some questions that are difficult to formulate (i.e. the question itself) and sometimes people need help just formulating the question itself. | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 18:45 | comment | added | Hans-Peter Stricker | @Pete: Isn't there a more pleasant characterization of such kind of questions than "just very, very soft": I dare to insist, that the question has some "substance" and that I (and probably some others) could tell what counts as a sensible - if not "correct" - answer. So: What's behind Ian's "etc."? | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 18:45 | comment | added | Kim Morrison | Please move this discussion (re: a companion site) to meta. | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 18:28 | comment | added | Hans-Peter Stricker | +1: Such a companion site would make me feel much better! | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 18:27 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | @ID: If you go to meta and make this comment, you will likely start an interesting discussion. You will also find that the same code used (and not written) by the MO creators is available to anyone: you could start such a companion site yourself. I should say though that I don't find this question to be either speculative or foundational: it's just very, very soft. | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 18:14 | comment | added | Ian Durham | I think it is clear from Pete's reply and from the problems some of my recent questions have engendered, that there is a need for an MO-like forum for questions such as this (speculative, foundational, etc.). If MO (via the community wiki tag) is not the place, then perhaps the creators of MO will share their code with someone willing to set up a companion site of some sort. | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 18:11 | answer | added | Gerald Edgar | timeline score: 3 | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 18:06 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | I have voted to close: this question is so subjective that it would be impossible to tell what counts as a correct answer. Also "tell me something interesting about math topic X" is not the kind of question that MO was created to answer, IMO. | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 16:46 | history | edited | Hans-Peter Stricker |
edited tags; Post Made Community Wiki
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| Feb 8, 2010 at 16:42 | comment | added | Hans-Peter Stricker | Good hint. But: OEIS is about sequences, my question is about sets. | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 16:37 | answer | added | Joel David Hamkins | timeline score: 6 | |
| Feb 8, 2010 at 16:33 | history | asked | Hans-Peter Stricker | CC BY-SA 2.5 |