Viewing profile — tmhn2

> Are they paid to type code or create programs? The goal is more to understand why something is true than just whether it is true. To oversimplify a lot, it's the difference betwe…

It's important to remember that historically many advances have been made without "customer value" in mind. Indeed, freeing oneself from such concerns can open up unexpected avenue…

That seems OK to me. I'd rather live in a state that funds beauty than one that doesn't. Think grants for artists, etc. A strictly practical world is not a good world to live in.

I think one reason it's discouraged is that it's not completely clear how long it lasts, and getting it early may result in less protection later in life. Also it's only been teste…

Research mathematicians have been finding the tools useful [1][2]. I think those problems are interesting, novel, and hard. The AI might stumble sometimes, but it also produces mea…

In that usage the object (football) ends up in the state of spiralling. So the HN title would, strictly speaking, mean that the magnetic fields are causing the black hole to spiral…

This comment made me curious so I looked up some data (sorry for the formatting, I don't know how to do it better): Guns per 100 people - Finland 2017: 32.49 (total of 1.79 million…

Right. What "reduction in biodiversity" means is that some species will adapt fast enough and some won't. Unfortunately, there is no lower limit to "reduction in biodiversity".

> some tropical trees will still be able to photosynthesize in tropical regions. Those will become the dominant species. Unless the environmental changes happen too fast for adapta…

And another fun and powerful technique is "proof by intimidation" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_intimidation ), in which you don't have to know what you're doing, but ot…

Not as prolific as that Nicolas Bourbaki guy, though!

John Conway showed a generalization of this problem is undecidable. I can't find a PDF but there's a blurb and citation on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjectu…

I don't think it's correct as stated in the article. Looking at the paper, it basically says: the orbit starting with N dips to f(N) for "most" N, where f is a function that goes t…

The authors of the paper are academics in university CS departments with heavy math backgrounds (one with a B.S. in mathematics, another was a visiting professor at MIT dept of mat…

Feedback is critical, though. I imagine many folks who have watched a lot of videos on, say, economics or history or physics or whatever else hugely overestimate what they understa…

The little cartoon shows they are ambient-isotopic--that they are just topologically equivalent is pretty clear already!