So much education content is so very poor. And even the best of it... A first-tier physics professor at a munch was delighted - he regaled believing he had found an error in a highly-regarded introductory textbook! But, upon many day's of thought, and several close reads of the text, he had realized it had been very carefully worded so as to be not incorrect. And so he was so delighted - yay! He thought of this as a…
Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
21–30 of 131 posts
Re: Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
#22So if I'm a little critical of the tone of the article, it comes from a place of love. There has been a very toxic, clickish vibe in Geometric Algebra circles, which have lead to some pseudo-disputes among those who should be natural allies.
One such is that Gunn, et al, prefer to represent a 3D vector using a dual basis (e.g. [a1, a2, a3]^T = a1*e32 + a2*e31+ a3*e12) whereas Lengyel prefers to just represent them as a1*e1 + a2*e2 +a3*e3. Some really unfortunately hostile back and forth arguing about which one is "the right way"--when in reality, it's a big-endian vs little-endian thing. One of the best parts of projective geometric algebra is that you can flip back and forth to the dual representation whenever you want to, according to what makes sense to you--and what makes the problem at hand easier to solve. Moreover, if you look at the actual calculations doing it one way vs doing it the other it's the same damn exact numbers being multiplied/added in the same damn way. It's not quite as silly as arguing about what font numbers should be printed with, but it's pretty close.
The tone of the article reflects wounds which are still pretty sore from these sorts of battles. So I understand. But sometimes the invective goes a bit to far.
An example of this is his critique of Gunn's initial cut of dualizaiton for PGA. The fact that e0 is not invertible is a big, fat wart, for sure. And frankly, I spent weeks trying to understand Gunn's workaround and its wierd lingo. J-map? What in the world is a J-map? I finally understood the concept, but I've never found out what "J" stands for :-) And Lengyel's treatment is much smoother and more coherent.
Yet, I don't think Gunn should be criticized for it at all. It was an act of courage for Gunn to come up with his janky J-map, and not let its janky-ness stop him and the rest of the field from moving forward. Sometimes that is exactly what is required in mathematics. For example, infinitesimals. For centuries, mathematicians from Archimedes to Newton found them indispensible, even though they had absolutely no coherent mathematical foundation. In point of fact, if you listen to, say, a Feynman lecture, you'll find that they are still indispensible today. But they didn't have any kind of mathematical foundation until the 1960's, when Robinson found a way to coherently axiomitize them.
I saw a video of Freeman Dyson once, where he was talking about how he was able to prove something which was a longstanding open problem. He described his proof as "very ugly" and then went on to say (with tongue partly in cheek) that you can judge how great a mathematician is by how many ugly proofs he creates :-) Because the first time something is proved, the proof is almost always very ugly. It's not until other mathematicians come in and find connections with other branches of math, and start being able to come up with more elegant proofs.
So let's celebrate the ugly, messy, janky-ness which is the reality of how mathematics is actually created, and the courage of the mathematicians to not rat-hole and bike-shed.
Eric Leyngel's presentation of projective geometric algebra is, IMHO, far more coherent and elegant than any other presentation. His books (and his source code) are a joy to read. For a newb like me, it is far easier and quicker to absorb. Isn't that good enough? Did he really have to go on to flame everybody else to a crisp? sigh like I said, he has been subjected to very unfair and toxic pillorying, and the wounds are still fresh, so like I said, I understand. But its very regrettable nevertheless.
Re: Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
#23[flagged]
You were not in the target audience. This was written for people already familiar with the theory of geometric algebras. Like any other mathematics paper, it cannot include the content of a whole textbook inside the paper, to provide context for non-mathematicians or for mathematicians with a different specialization. Here on HN there are every day links to "walls of text" that are trivial to understand for those fam…
Re: Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
#24If you don't like their geometric algebra you can try mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344163 Then you can try stuff like folding these spaces to make your own multiplication and division with numbers you don't have to explain to anyone!
Re: Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
#25[flagged]
You were not in the target audience. This was written for people already familiar with the theory of geometric algebras. Like any other mathematics paper, it cannot include the content of a whole textbook inside the paper, to provide context for non-mathematicians or for mathematicians with a different specialization. Here on HN there are every day links to "walls of text" that are trivial to understand for those fam…
.. how is _my_ comment flagged, when all but one other comments are just randomly jumping on the title (which has nothing to do with the article btw)? I at least claimed that I've read the first big chunk of the article (before dismissing it), while none of the other comments are about the article or show any sign that they've read the article. (And the other comment dismisses the article too, despite "being a big fan of the author".)
Re: Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
#26If you don't like their geometric algebra you can try mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344163 Then you can try stuff like folding these spaces to make your own multiplication and division with numbers you don't have to explain to anyone!
So far as I can see, this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with geometric algebra in the sense being discussed here.
Re: Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far as I can see, this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with geometric algebra in the sense being discussed here.
[flagged]
Re: Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
#28So much education content is so very poor. And even the best of it... A first-tier physics professor at a munch was delighted - he regaled believing he had found an error in a highly-regarded introductory textbook! But, upon many day's of thought, and several close reads of the text, he had realized it had been very carefully worded so as to be not incorrect. And so he was so delighted - yay! He thought of this as a…
I tried to report an open calculus textbook from Rice University’s talking about relativistic mass as an error (It’s pretty well-established as a bad concept in physics education at this point as opposed to the momentum energy 4 vector) and they wouldn’t accept my feedback.
Re: Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
#29For a professional working in linear algebra, supervising a graduate student, it should be straightforward to translate these "higher order" linear algebra objects into the geometric algebra model, without publishing technically incoherent mistakes.
Re: Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
#30Note don't to be confused with Algebraic Geometry they are different; When I first came across this topic it was eye opening, especially the fact that you could squeeze Maxwell's equations into one and the fact that pseudovector create by cross product from physics is just a bivector which in 3d could be represented like a vector orthogonal to the plane created by the two vectors in the product Primer on the topic ht…