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Math writing is dull when it neglects the human dimension

golem.ph.utexas.edu

41–50 of 186 posts

Re: Math writing is dull when it neglects the human dimension

#41
This is one of those things that is extremely insidious because it holds a kernel of truth but the author takes it to a place that in my opinion is really unhelpful.

For example, his opening paragraph "One of the main problems..." seems fine to me for setting the context, but I would immediately want him to follow with "Let ..." and state the proper definition. All of the extra fluffiness means I have to do two translations - from the fluffy part to the actual maths and then back again - each time to understand what he is getting at.

In my opinion, great maths writing is both rigourous and engaging. I would use "Calculus" by Michael Spivak as an example. It's really lovely to read but also concise and elegant and the beauty of (and love for) the maths comes through on every page. The author isn't trying to turn it into a short story and it's not padded out with additional rhetorical bullshit like "And now we come to a key player: the group of deck transformations." That sentence makes me want to puke just a little bit.

But all of the above is a matter of opinion. This, for me is a hard nope:

   This may require “watering down” the results being described — stating corollaries or special cases instead of the full theorems in their maximal generality. Sometimes you may even need to leave out technical conditions required for the results to really be true.
I really really hate it when people do shit like this. State things properly even if you need to say something like "don't worry about x y z condition I put there for now which will be explained later". He says you must warn the reader you're doing this but basically I think this is just a hard pass from then onwards.

Like if you want to give a simpler version of something, you can by all means do:

This is known as seanhunter's theorem, which is usually stated as, if blah blah blah...

When x is a real number greater than zero this can be simplified as follows:

If x is the number of minutes spent in a meeting and p is the number of participants, then the expected value of the meeting is given by

v= r/sqrt(x^3p^2) r~N(mu, sigma^2)

... or whatever.

So you give the real version and then the "special case" version that is actually useful most of the time. Like when people give you Fermat's little theorem[1] and they say a^p is congruent with a mod p but that is equivalent to saying if p does not divide a then a^(p-1) congruent with 1 (which is the one you're going to actually use most of the time).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_little_theorem

Re: Math writing is dull when it neglects the human dimension

#42

As somebody who works in a mathy subarea of computer science, oh man, I agree. My heart always falls when I need a result and it turns out the original paper is some terse typewritten notice from the 70s whose first sentence is a definition with a bunch of proper nouns and whose main theorem is given at the most general possible level with no applications at all. I have talked with math people about why this is, and…

While gatekeeping is definitely a thing, I really suspect it's not the major incentive here.

In writing (both prose and code!) there is always a question of target audience, which inevitably excludes the not-target audience. Personally, for a field in which I'm an expert, it's really annoying to continually wade through introductory material and hand-holding just to get to some small nugget of substance. In that case, I'm definitely not the target audience, so I'll go looking for another communications channel that offers the compressed/elegant/general/abstract/terse formulations I desire. Please don't then insist that I'm being unfair and exclusionary if you're not the target audience on those specific communications channels.

For math papers and whatnot, whitepapers are like the one established channel for experts, while everyone else has textbooks, introductory pamphlets, blogs, youtube videos, etc. I agree, however, that there are cases where non-experts could benefit from knowledge siloed within expert communication channels, but this is an unfortunate systematic side-effect not malice.

Honestly, with software development, I find it disappointing that our social conventions currently conflate "readability" with "comfort and familiarity to Generic Programmer" instead of something more useful like "facilitates domain understanding and insight to the primary developers".

Re: Math writing is dull when it neglects the human dimension

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My advice to all academics in STEM is, just write the main body of the paper exactly as how the orthodoxy demands. Use the style needed to get the paper accepted. Then, add a supplementary or appendix of the paper that is written for the human graduate student. Put in worked out examples, further details on the proof. Most times, it will just get through, and you will have accomplished your goal. If the journal deman…

This is good advice, but for a very different problem. 1. The problem in math is not that the way the "orthodoxy" insists on presenting things in a suboptimal way, but that if the reviewers find a good explanation of your result, they'll recommend that you publish in a lower-ranked venue than your result would ordinarily merit (at least unless you solved a famous problem). So researchers are incentivized to make the…

I think this is fair criticism. I am coming for theoretical physics, where, at least in my area, I see my proposed strategy actually being practiced quite often. Physicists are quite a lot less grouchy than mathematicians, and there is a lot less of your point 1 in Physics.

That said, to present in "high impact" journals, you do have to write your results in some grand fashion where it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But the results, not the proofs. Then again, the difficult theorem proving papers are rarely published in high impact journals.

Also, I have seen quite a number of papers where the arxiv submission is more updated/expanded than the published version. If you have some new framework that you want people to adopt, then it is in your benefit that grad students actually understand the ins and outs of it, so people so inclined do put in some effort to make their results accessible.

Re: Math writing is dull when it neglects the human dimension

#44
post #33

The author may well be on to something but personally I hate "story mode" in popular science books, and would really hate it in actual science papers, both the ones I read for work and the ones I read for fun. I want to go straight to the equations -- often I prefer them to the graphs. But (not joking here) this is a perfect opportunity for an LLM -- two opportunities, actually. LLM A takes a dry paper and gives it c…

I would say "story mode" in papers is like dancing about your doctorate: really cool when the combination works, but the latter is where all the value lies, so it shouldn't sacrifice anything for the former.

What about LLM C, which takes a set of papers as vertices, forms an abstract simplex of all their combinations, and then spits out new papers on the ten most interesting higher-dimensional faces?

Re: Math writing is dull when it neglects the human dimension

#45
post #29

This really reminds me of a writing course I took called “Writing Stories for Science”. That’s where I first encountered the idea of story beats. The class seemed more focused on the natural sciences and story structures, so I got the impression this must be very difficult to apply to pure mathematical writing. Maybe it’s easier in applied mathematics where there’s a clearer reason that could be explained to a layper…

I don't think the point here is to make a math paper understandable to a lay person, but rather make it interesting and contextualize it for other academics.

Other academics are already interested and either already have or know where to get the context; that's why the style is the way it is.

Re: Math writing is dull when it neglects the human dimension

#46
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO it's even worse. Once we figure out P vs NP, we will understand what it means to invert boolean functions algorithmically, and all mathematics will be replaced with an automated process. I'm sorry, but that's just naive techno-solutionism. Maybe the computer will be able to solve your syntax problems, i.e., write proofs. It will never know anything about the semantics. Said differently. Maybe the computer will…

My point is, the need for semantics is a human construct, it's not required to solve practical problems. Practical value of MVT is that we can apply it in the process of describing a solution, i.e. an algorithm. But if you have a SAT algorithm that can somehow inherently apply a finite instance of MVT, you no longer need to know what MVT is. And this is at the heart of P vs NP question, how to solve SAT, and once we…

Most equations that can be solved can already be solved symbolically by things like mathematica or numerically by a grab-bag of numerical techniques that every maths, engineering and physics student learns at some point. You don't need to have found the solution to P vs NP to do any of that.

I think most mathematicians would say that most of maths is not in solving equations because once you get the right equations, solving them is a simple mechanical process for the most part. Most of maths is figuring out what the right equations are in the first place and proving that what you have done is legitimate.

Re: Math writing is dull when it neglects the human dimension

#47
Decades ago, I struggled with the start of a math class as a young engineering student until one professor, one day, said, "It's easy to calculate how many feet of steel you need to get from point A to point B but what if you need to calculate the number of feet for the curved support under the Eads' bridge?" He then proceeded to show how it's done and everything sunk in after that.

Re: Math writing is dull when it neglects the human dimension

#49
post #38

It's not just papers. I tried to learn probabilities theory & statistics, deeper than little knowledge I kept from the uni. For instance, wanted to understand how you solve problems like samples in quality control: if in a sample of N items, m are bad, what's the chance X% are bad in production? Unfortunately, there are either introductory materials (toss a coin -- 50% chance faces) or some robot language. Or schizop…

I feel like you must be a using a wrong approach to searching for mathematics. In your case I would search for a script or book with title "Introduction to probabilify theory" or "Introduction to mathematical statistics". Then you skim through it to see if you can find an analysis of your problem. If not, you can hopefully find out what the right keywords are to then find a more advanced script or book for the specif…

That's what I tried to avoid in the first place :)

Re: Math writing is dull when it neglects the human dimension

#50
post #33

The author may well be on to something but personally I hate "story mode" in popular science books, and would really hate it in actual science papers, both the ones I read for work and the ones I read for fun. I want to go straight to the equations -- often I prefer them to the graphs. But (not joking here) this is a perfect opportunity for an LLM -- two opportunities, actually. LLM A takes a dry paper and gives it c…

This was my initial reaction as well, as I have complete disdain for the lowest common denominator approach to many things in modern society. But then something occurred to me - IMO one of the most well written scientific papers is Einstein's special relativity paper. [1] But it's absolutely a 'story mode' paper! A moderately educated individual could easily understand and follow the paper, even if they might not necessarily follow all the math. It just flows inordinately better than most modern papers - most of which are written on comparably simple and evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) topics.

Of course this may be an issue of domain. I'm mostly interested in cosmology/astronomy/physics, where math is a tool rather than the object of the paper itself.

[1] - https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf

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