Timeline for Mathematics and autodidactism
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 12, 2010 at 20:49 | comment | added | Bill Dubuque | @Adrian: the motivation behind Zagier's proof is much clearer when expressed in the language of binary quadratic forms so to highlight the connection with Gaussian reduction, see mathoverflow.net/questions/31113/… | |
| Jun 17, 2010 at 0:55 | comment | added | Adrian Barquero-Sanchez | So after we had completed the proof, the professor came in the next week and said that he had been unsatisfied with the presentation and that he had been looking up Heath-Brown, and Liouville and who knows which other old source and that he had found where the functions and the weird choices for the particular sets in question came from, and then he began explaining everything. It was rather nice to see this since otherwise I would have never done that myself. | |
| Jun 17, 2010 at 0:52 | comment | added | Adrian Barquero-Sanchez | Exactly. I have another example of this in mind. I don't know if you're familiar with Don Zagier's famous article "A One-Sentence Proof That Every Prime p = 1 (mod 4) Is a Sum of Two Squares". Well when I was taking a number theory course last year we saw this proof, and I have to tell you that the proof is amazing, although you do get the impression that everything falls down from the sky because you need to make some really unmotivated choices for some subsets of triples of natural numbers and some functions between them. | |
| Jun 17, 2010 at 0:46 | comment | added | Qiaochu Yuan | I disagree that this kind of insight is the sole province of social interaction. Such insights are common on high-quality blogs, e.g. Terence Tao's or Tim Gowers's, and they can also be found in several high-quality MO answers. | |
| Jun 17, 2010 at 0:31 | comment | added | Bruno Joyal | This is the kind of answer I'm hoping for! Your example is good. Books are often very formal (which is good - it's mathematics, after all!), but understanding the formal side of an idea usually requires having an informal and intuitive understanding beforehand. It's usually much easier to obtain this from somebody else who has it already than to work it all out on your own. | |
| Jun 17, 2010 at 0:22 | history | answered | Adrian Barquero-Sanchez | CC BY-SA 2.5 |