Mathematicians Prove 30-Year-Old André-Oort Conjecture | Hacker News Reader

Mathematicians Prove 30-Year-Old André-Oort Conjecture

quantamagazine.org

94 pointstheafh19 comments

I am consistently impressed by the publication quality at Quanta Magazine. Their articles are a joy to read for an audience of any background. I also enjoy Aeon[0] and Psyche[1]. Can anyone recommend publishers of similar quality in other domains?

[0] https://aeon.co

[1] https://psyche.co/

Unfortunately, I don't think anything matches Quanta for what they do (covering cutting-edge advances in science in an accurate and accessible manner).

One of the things that really helps Quanta is that if there is an article about math, typically it is written by a mathematician (and likewise for other areas). For "softer" subjects, e.g. politics, history or law, the Atlantic is often similar in this regard, and I enjoy their articles.

I like nautil.us also

Another huge advance in number theory--alongside the subconvexity result posted last month--in a vastly different area of the subject. 2021 was a great year for number theory. (This of course assumes both results are correct!)

> 2021 was a great year for number theory.

Maybe it was because for the last two years everyone was stuck at home because of Covid.

There are only so many Netflix movies/shows you can watch before you start playing around with number theory out of sheer boredom.

The people who write these kinds of papers, believe it or not, prefer to spend most of their time playing with numbers compared to watching Netflix. (This is not to say that they don't enjoy spending any time on the latter.)

I use to joke Linux could only have been written in Finland, during winter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29929935 Think this is the subconvexity one?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790830 This one is also related to primes.

> To prove the André-Oort conjecture, Pila needed to show that a non-Shimura variety living inside a Shimura variety doesn’t have a lot of special points.

This looks just so advanced to me. Is that how people sound when they talk about programming ?

No, only functional programmers sound like this!

Yes.

>Build, test, and deploy with CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud. Connect to GitHub or any other Git provider and deploy continuously.

(from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/)

>Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

(from https://kubernetes.io/)

The paragraphs you quoted are at least partially self-explanatory, mostly using common English words like "platform" in a metaphorical sense. Whereas the paragraph the grandparent quoted has several concepts that are opaquely named after mathematicians, providing not even a hint of what they might mean.

“Git” is literally a random word. “Kubernetes” also doesn't tell you anything.

And Shimura does?

No. That's why it's an answer to “Is that how people sound when they talk about programming?”

Probably nothing is quite so abstruse as abstract mathematics, and few subjects in math are as abstruse as arithmetic geometry (the subject of this paper).

Just a lot of standardization and years of intuiting what these mean.

In this case, you definitely need some intuition of elliptic curves and "special points" that is hard to explain, but Quanta does it decently.

Here's an example from the ARM Architecture Reference Manual (B.2.3.6) that often throws people for a loop--

> For a read or a write RW1 from an Observer that is Ordered-before a read or a write RW2 from a different Observer, the External visibility requirement requires that RW2 is not Observed-by RW1. This means that an Architecturally well-formed execution must not exhibit a cycle in the Ordered-before relation.

I'm not sure I understand the ARM manual example. It seems obvious that an operation should not be able to see what is supposed to happen "after" it executes, and that a time-like construct should not contain loops (outside of SF literature). I'm sure I'm missing a lot of detail here, but I really can't say that I feel confused by it.

Ed. Oh wait, so maybe I'm just sufficiently similar to the intended audience. But wouldn't everyone who reads such a manual be?

I wonder how the authors perceive the world around them. Because after opening and skimming the PDF I certainly felt transported to a strange, alien place… with no resemblance of my own surroundings.

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