Timeline for Awfully sophisticated proof for simple facts
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 21, 2012 at 1:27 | comment | added | Igor Rivin | The book has NOT been reprinted, but: dl.dropbox.com/u/5188175/MathMadeDifficult.pdf | |
| Jun 5, 2011 at 15:07 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | Not to cast a damper on things, but in the footnote on page 47 that Qiaochu refers to, I think he probably means what is normally called a 'coequaliser', not an 'equaliser'. (The monoid of natural numbers may be constructed as the coequaliser in $Cat$ of the two functors from 1 to 2.) At various points in the past, Mathematics Made Difficult had me howling with laughter, and I've never found it as crude as Johnstone does. I do find it a little bit unkind. :-) | |
| Oct 21, 2010 at 4:28 | comment | added | Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine | Peter Johnstone’s wonderful review of Paul Taylor’s Practical Foundations of Mathematics is worth reading in this connection: cs.man.ac.uk/~pt/Practical_Foundations/Johnstone-review.html “Nearly 30 years later, Paul Taylor has finally written the book of which Mathematics Made Difficult was a parody. That is not intended as a criticism of Practical Foundations of Mathematics...” | |
| Oct 19, 2010 at 12:54 | comment | added | Qiaochu Yuan | This book is fantastic. From the bottom of page 47: "As an axiom on which to base the positive numbers and the integers, which have in the past produced much harmless amusement and are still widely accepted as useful by most mathematicians, some such proposition as the following is sometimes considered as being pleasant, elegant, or at least handy: AXIOM: Equalisers exist in the category of categories." | |
| Oct 19, 2010 at 3:18 | comment | added | Gwyn Whieldon | @Nate: Absolutely can spare it... Keep it as long as you like, it's a very strange read. | |
| Oct 18, 2010 at 18:59 | comment | added | Nate Eldredge | @Gwyn: that was me :) Hope you can spare it for a bit, I'm really curious now. I'll try not to keep it long. | |
| Oct 18, 2010 at 18:47 | history | edited | Greg Graviton | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
nicer link
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| Oct 18, 2010 at 18:10 | comment | added | Gwyn Whieldon | Ah, this book is wonderful... In the wake of this post, someone recalled the copy I had out from the library. :) | |
| Oct 18, 2010 at 7:36 | comment | added | paul Monsky | I wonder if this wonderful book will be reprinted. | |
| Oct 17, 2010 at 18:55 | comment | added | Harald Hanche-Olsen | A nice quote from the book: “Little minds love to ask big questions, or what appears to them as big questions; never stopping to reflect how trivial the answer must be, if only the questioner would take the trouble to think it through. Sometimes it is necessary for the writer of such a serious work as the present one to call a halt in the consideration of matters of real weight and interest and to remember how weak and frail are the reasoning powers of his lowly readers.” | |
| Oct 17, 2010 at 16:59 | history | answered | Barry | CC BY-SA 2.5 |