Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is MICMAM? Whitepapers, lectures, and speech transcriptions are also good motivation, and useful resources. Sometimes overwhelming, especially if reading mathematical text is as a foreign language. And sometimes it takes you down a rabbit hole. My biggest block for learning math has really been all the unlearning. After a while ideas like negative numbers and zeros and processes like addition and subtraction sto…
> What is MICMAM? Check my [1] at root. > Where to go from there - philosophy or computation? For me, there's plenty of fun in mathematics without venturing even near the edges of it. Maybe one day I'll grow bored of it, who knows - it's a lifelong process.
I have been studying lisp and wanted to understand more about the origins. So I went back to the beginning of the language and read the various McCarthy papers. But what he was thinking is not entirely clear to me. So I wonder, what papers was he studying himself when he wrote this? That is easy to answer as he put the references right there in the back of the paper for me to track down. So I start reading papers written by Church and Godel. I repeat this process recursively while looking for shared references. That network of interconnected papers is a treasure trove of useful information. Reading the same papers an author was reading during their writing process is a valuable way to expand your understanding of their work.