mathgenius

Stop relying on Doctors. They are good at fixing acute problems, but for chronic stuff not so much.

I believe mathematics as a field is really suffering because there is not much in the way of "Feynman"-style books. But people like John Baez and John Conway have countered this trend somewhat. You should definitely try reading anything by these two. Conway does tend to be a bit too brief at times.

And there's this book: "Conceptual mathematics" by Lawvere and Schanuel. It's unlike any other mathematics text I have found. Fundamental and easy to read: yes. Also leads up to some deep ideas in an intuitive way.

It might be easier to think of it as a kind of Feynman diagram: a sum over paths. That's what matrix multiplication is, it's a kind of sum over weighted paths. A matrix records all the ways to get from the set of "columns" to the set of "rows".

Ok, but where are the string diagrams for Chu spaces?

Absolutely.

It's a problem with academia in general. Academics don't get rewarded for explaining things in an easy to understand way. Moreover, it is often a huge amount of work to distill results down like this. And if you succeed the response you may get is "well that is obvious".

Anyway, this is my counter argument to the "formalization of mathematics": why don't we incentivize people to bring some clarity to the exposition? If mathematics is suffering from faulty proofs, then I have little sympathy. Make it simpler, organize the concepts. Muscular calculations only go so far.

You can head over to cocalc.com, fire up a sage worksheet, and stick this in:

    for n in range(1, 13):
        field = GF(2^n)
        count = 0
        for x in field:
          for y in field:
            if y^2+y == x^3+x:
                count += 1
        print n, 2^n, count
    

if you want to play around with some of these numbers.

> excellent predictions

Sometimes QM provides us with no prediction whatsoever as to what will happen next (eg. photon splitting experiment.) I would not call this "excellent."

> chaotic nature

Chaos theory is something else.

> results out of CERN

Particle physics is also not particularly relevant to this discussion. Fundamental particles is a separate issue to interpretations (foundations) of QM.

This is not pagerank. But they really should use pagerank in this nature article because (very likely) it will blow away this self-citation problem. People should be able to self-cite as much as they want. Not using pagerank is the problem.

Hey, I like your writing.

You are the world's best X, for X equal to you.

> A 2015 study of 1,000 medical journal submissions found that of the papers that were eventually published, the 14 that became the most frequently cited were initially rejected. Groundbreaking studies by Sir Frank MacFarlane Burnet, Rosalind Yalow, Baruch Blumberg and others were rejected by peer reviewers, yet later led to Nobel Prizes.

Yup, if you are actually doing good work it is likely to be so different to what is going on that people have a hard time evaluating it.

Possibly a reference to the Mad Max movie...

> They must take a good, hard look at the quantum computers they are building and ask how will they make them useful.

Plenty of people in the field are working on exactly this. For example:

https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.8.041...

Indeed, Lambek was one of the founders of categorical grammer, and from the article:

""" Around 2004 I was giving a talk at the McGill category Theory seminar about our then new diagrammatic description of quantum teleportation. Lambek immediately pointed out: “Those are pre-groups!” The compact closed category-theory underpinning of quantum theory, have indeed pregroups as the posetal instance. It was this connection, between grammar and teleportation diagrams, that inspired the DisCoCat model, making it look as if word-meaning being teleported around in sentences by means of the channels provided by the pregroup grammar """

What are you talking about? This is the string diagram version.

But, not even matter is "very much matter".

I'm a quantum maximalist: the brain is just the antennae, receiving and broadcasting. Attention itself cuts (slices) through the quantum soup, and as a result, these mind-forms appear.

Quantum physics is based on complex Hilbert spaces. This is quite different to the theory of functions of a complex variable. I think Dirac was just making s!!t up here.

But anyway, by now modern theoretical physics has hoovered up quite a lot of 19th century pure mathematics, including this theory mentioned by Dirac. Specifically I'm thinking of things like conformal field theory.

This question "What are numbers?" I find way more fruitful to contemplate than any answer I have so far found. And why should we be adults anyway? Adults already know all the answers. Ask this question like a five year old would.

Artists may not need calculus, but calculus would certainly benefit from artists.

All models are wrong. You are free to decide if this is a bug or a feature of any particular model.

> With the surge in Vim usage, we really need to do something about the initial experience of Emacs

Um.. It took me 10 years to get over the initial horror of vim, but after that, it was awesome.

> Quantum mechanics can be simulated classically with an exponential slowdown.

This is actually quite subtle. For example, I don't see how you can "simulate" bell non-locality. Is it even possible to define the word "simulate" here? The whole status of quantum randomness is unsettled, I don't think it can be settled, but anyway it is not as straightforward as you suggest.

Scott Aaronson has a nice paper where he discusses related ideas: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159

Some of these are hilarious. Are you sure you are not a comedian?

Very sad to read about this. I actually didn't realize that Russia still had any free press.

bi-solid, bi-liquid, bi-melting point. Unless it already means something else.

> the distinction between a quantum system being measured or unitarily evolved

When you try to describe a part of an entangled quantum system, independently of the whole, you will be forced to use probabilities in your description. This is quantum measurement.

Some more background from John Preskill:

"The idea that quantum effects could have an important role in brain function is not new, but is routinely dismissed as wildly implausible. Matthew Fisher begs to differ. And those who read his paper (as I hope many will) are bound to conclude: This old guy’s not so crazy. He may be onto something. At least he’s raising some very interesting questions."

https://quantumfrontiers.com/2015/11/06/wouldnt-you-like-to-...

It may or may not be a dumb idea, but it is certainly lacking in imagination. I am all for doing more science, but going to the moon? again? and what did we learn the first time? (apart from how awesome we are at doing stuff.)

Hopefully we will see results way before we start breaking RSA. It looks like people are targeting applications in quantum chemistry [1]. Also, Dyakonov's criticisms are toothless, see comments here [2].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00862

[2] https://scirate.com/arxiv/1903.10760

Two other places where we should be rewarding boredom: finance, and politics. There's no reason why good, important work should be correlated with excitement or interest.

I'm very sorry this person is having to suffer all this crap, but

> conferences tend to net to a loss.

If you put out a lot of energy, for "free", then you often get shit in return. If you don't take responsibility for what you are getting back for all your hard effort, things can easily go pear-shaped. This seems to be one of those mystical laws of the universe. I'm not saying you should be selfish, or charge big bucks for your time. There are plenty of ways for people to give something back, and you need to make sure that is happening too.