The paper that keeps showing up
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The paper that keeps showing up
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: The paper that keeps showing up
#2I have a question for people who read this and whose eyes aren't immediately glazing over: I am incredibly put off by math that feels like "symbol manipulation". Equations that I can't easily put in terms of geometry or statistics. I think something in me "broke" with the constant "i" (square root of -1) during my education - a purely synthetic concept that I used to manipulate equations and get good grades without any intuition behind it. I am having a similar experience just looking at the aesthetics of this paper. Swimming in symbols, detached from tangible reality.
My question is: did I just kinda hit the limit of my IQ / abstract thinking skills? Do other people smarter than me think all this makes sense on an intuitive level?
Re: The paper that keeps showing up
#3I have a question for people who read this and whose eyes aren't immediately glazing over: I am incredibly put off by math that feels like "symbol manipulation". Equations that I can't easily put in terms of geometry or statistics. I think something in me "broke" with the constant "i" (square root of -1) during my education - a purely synthetic concept that I used to manipulate equations and get good grades without a…
Like EVERYTHING, an unaccustomed mind will have trouble at first, and will manage to make sense of it later. Try reading something in Chinese, will you understand what you read? Now try to learn the language and try to read the same thing again a year later. Can you read it now? Probably not. It’ll require many years. Is it that you’re dumb? There’s billions of people who learned how to read that language.
Re: The paper that keeps showing up
#4I have a question for people who read this and whose eyes aren't immediately glazing over: I am incredibly put off by math that feels like "symbol manipulation". Equations that I can't easily put in terms of geometry or statistics. I think something in me "broke" with the constant "i" (square root of -1) during my education - a purely synthetic concept that I used to manipulate equations and get good grades without a…
No. It's just purely a matter of practice. If you don't understand it now, you will with enough time and repetition. I had classes lectured by Maurer some time ago. At first it was all gibberish but with time and repetition and practice everything becomes clear. It's interesting because I would say Maurer really puts effort into being _extremely exact and precise_ and even reading this I can appreciate that now. There's an element of that which makes it much easier and clearer to grasp than a math paper which is skipping over some basics and definitions and is more inexact because it leaves you guessing at times.
Re: The paper that keeps showing up
#5What a great read! It's so refreshing to read this kind of article when normally bogged down by the day-to-day grind of writing code.
Re: The paper that keeps showing up
#6I have a question for people who read this and whose eyes aren't immediately glazing over: I am incredibly put off by math that feels like "symbol manipulation". Equations that I can't easily put in terms of geometry or statistics. I think something in me "broke" with the constant "i" (square root of -1) during my education - a purely synthetic concept that I used to manipulate equations and get good grades without a…
Just needs practice. It's like when you want to learn a new language. If you hear too much of a language you don't have practice off, you might just get put off by it. But the more you practice, the more you understand subconsciously, the more you can show interest.
Re: The paper that keeps showing up
#7I have a question for people who read this and whose eyes aren't immediately glazing over: I am incredibly put off by math that feels like "symbol manipulation". Equations that I can't easily put in terms of geometry or statistics. I think something in me "broke" with the constant "i" (square root of -1) during my education - a purely synthetic concept that I used to manipulate equations and get good grades without a…
You can think of `i` as a rotation by 90 degrees counterclockwise.
You do it twice and the real number line gets reflected (as if multiplied by -1).
It is what multiplying by i actually does to the complex plane.
Re: The paper that keeps showing up
#8Beautiful explanation. After reading this I wonder if anyone knows about homomorphic encryption and ZKP uses for role/policy management? Or something similar?
They main uses I know for ZKPs are in open distributed scenarios but I wonder if it could be used to simplify other spaces where public/private keys are involved.
For example, instead of having a user creating roles and policies and storing all of this info in a traditional DB we could have a token system based on homomorphic keys that we can verify... Where we could aggregate tokens, generate tokens with specific policies on-demand without storing it in a DB...
Re: The paper that keeps showing up
#9I have a question for people who read this and whose eyes aren't immediately glazing over: I am incredibly put off by math that feels like "symbol manipulation". Equations that I can't easily put in terms of geometry or statistics. I think something in me "broke" with the constant "i" (square root of -1) during my education - a purely synthetic concept that I used to manipulate equations and get good grades without a…
You can think of `i` as a rotation by 90 degrees counterclockwise. You do it twice and the real number line gets reflected (as if multiplied by -1). It is what multiplying by i actually does to the complex plane.
I like how your illustration also implies that -i is also square root of -1, which is true
Re: The paper that keeps showing up
#10I have a question for people who read this and whose eyes aren't immediately glazing over: I am incredibly put off by math that feels like "symbol manipulation". Equations that I can't easily put in terms of geometry or statistics. I think something in me "broke" with the constant "i" (square root of -1) during my education - a purely synthetic concept that I used to manipulate equations and get good grades without a…
You can think of `i` as a rotation by 90 degrees counterclockwise. You do it twice and the real number line gets reflected (as if multiplied by -1). It is what multiplying by i actually does to the complex plane.
Yes, the name imaginary does it no favours. I was confused for so long about i, as it was never explained on classes, and it wasn't until 3blue1brown and other math youtubers showed me the light. I really like this series on it by Welch Labs - loads of easily digestible videos, and a history lesson to boot: