Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

My general understanding is that the last person to be well-versed in basically all of mathematics was Euler. When he got through with it, the field was too broad for any mortal to obtain a working knowledge of most of it. It seems that now, given the above, hardly anybody tries to broaden their horizons after a certain point in their career. (It feels like every course I take these days, I end up making a connection between a topic and another branch of math or computer science, but my instructor doesn't know enough about the other field to appreciate what I bring up.)

While I don't think the problem is quite as severe as Zeilberger claims, I do feel like conference talks should strive to be more accessible to specialists of other fields and to students. Particularly for a conference like the Joint Mathematics Meetings, it would be cool if speakers prepared their talks to be more like TED talks: just technical enough to make sure that the audience can understand the really interesting aspect of the research.

One of my college professors put that suggestion like this: Write to an audience of intelligent 17 year olds. Ignorant of your topic and unwilling to put up with confusing writing, but curious and capable of understanding complex ideas.

When I followed that advice my writing was clearer and better balanced. I also found that the narrative in every piece (even technically orientated stuff) became stronger.

I don't write essay's any more, but it's still the standard by which I measure every email and comment I write.

I'm in the process of writing my thesis and one of my advisors asked me: "Who are you writing this for?". I had a few ideas, but I answered, "For him and our collaborators."

"Wrong! - You should be writing for the graduate student who will be picking up your work."

Any graduate student or even many professors will be on a similar level when exposed to something new. By explaining stuff at a relatively simple level, with enough intermediate steps to outline the method, most people can grasp how you did what you did.

Maybe not 17 year olds, but aimed at people well versed in mathematics, but not necessarily in that field.

If you try to write for an audience of intelligent 17-year-olds, you may, possibly, manage to successfully explain to a professional in your field.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kh/explainers_shoot_high_aim_low/

One of the reasons that mathematics is so vast and powerful is because people have focused their efforts in specialized areas. If math weren't so broad that a single person could understand it all then it would be pretty unimpressive.

I disagree the characterization that mathematicians don't try to broaden their horizons. Like scholars of any subject, mathematicians follow their interests, which often take them to places never expected to be. To me, that fits the bill for "broadening horizons". And if they don't seem to move far outside of their focus of study, well, I say it has to be this way because mathematical material is often so dense and precise that it takes a very long time to understand what's going on in any one subject.

Yes. But we should at least give talks to our follow mathematicians that they can understand and enjoy.

I've heard the last person to know all of mathematics to be Pascal (d. 1662), Euler (d. 1783), Poincare (d. 1912), or Hilbert (d. 1943). Most of the internet seems to believe that it was Poincare.

See ref to "the last universalist" in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincare

The Wikipedia reference comes from a book called Men of Mathematics by Eric Temple Bell, I believe.

Most of the Internet == Wikipedia?

It's pretty clear that he ran a search or two and provided the Wikipedia link for clarity.

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