Timeline for What's a mathematician to do?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 30, 2011 at 23:49 | history | edited | Sridhar Ramesh | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Corrected presumable typo
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| Dec 20, 2010 at 14:30 | comment | added | J W | Let us not forget the honourable and fulfulling, yet often thankless task of many mathematics teachers, who quite possibly create little or no new mathematics at all, but aid others in learning it. | |
| Oct 31, 2010 at 13:33 | comment | added | Sam Nead | "Is a theorem true if nobody understands it?" I vaguely recall an on-line discussion about which parts of mathematics have died because they are no longer actively studied. I have looked for it but couldn't find it. | |
| Oct 27, 2010 at 8:25 | comment | added | Greg Graviton | "Does a theorem make a sound if nobody can understand it?" | |
| Oct 27, 2010 at 5:52 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | Well, Erd\H{o}s wrote a lot of things. | |
| Oct 27, 2010 at 2:53 | comment | added | Kevin O'Bryant | Was it Erd\H{o}s who said, "Everybody writes, nobody reads."? | |
| Oct 26, 2010 at 20:02 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | Andy, this is really what I meant; perhaps I said it badly because I was in a hurry. I think OP was drawing attention to the huge celebrated results, whereas I mean to point to the huge body of lesser theorems and lemmas we prove in our everyday work which help make possible the way to the bigger results. (I'm in a hurry again, so perhaps I said it badly again.) Anyway, I agree with you 100%. | |
| Oct 26, 2010 at 19:57 | comment | added | Qiaochu Yuan | @Andy: yes, but if there aren't enough people around to organize everybody else's original insights and good work in a fashion that makes it possible to pass it on to the next generation, what's the point? I think we can all agree that the rate at which mathematics is currently being produced is higher than the rate at which any given person can learn it... | |
| Oct 26, 2010 at 19:53 | comment | added | Andy Putman | While I certainly agree that exposition and teaching are extremely important, I strongly disagree with the notion that 90% of the work of mathematicians is "the challenge of digesting and reworking over the cumulative insights and re-presenting them in a useful way for others". We prove theorems (new and original ones) too! I think it is important for young people to realize that math is so huge that even if you are pretty ordinary, there is plenty of room to have original insights and do good work. | |
| Oct 26, 2010 at 19:41 | history | answered | Todd Trimble | CC BY-SA 2.5 |