41–50 of 255 posts
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> Why it would be something extra ordinary? You give screenshot, date... Journalists do it all the time: "evil X are attacking Y while doing Z". It's just funny. I usually associate 4chan as primarily shitposting. Memes and offensive-stuff-for-the-sake-of-being-offensive and porn. You don't generally see mathematical work being done on there.
apparently only /b /pol and maybe 1 or 2 others are bananas. the rest is well moderated and civil.
Loath as I am to give 4chan credit for anything positive, I feel like the article subject is slightly dismissive with its use of the phrase "stumbled upon." The anonymous 4chan user clearly did the work , it's not as though they came upon a proof written in the sand. For all we know it was a grad student with an ABD in Statistics who just happened to like anime. But the phrasing almost implies it's not a true accompl…
i took it to mean that they stumbled upon it in the sense that they didn't try to make a novel contribution to the field of mathematics or think they were doing that, but just solving a specific problem
But you would find it strange if the article said, "Oncologist stumbles upon cure for cancer while testing new colon cancer treatment." Because in that case, the scientist is seemingly doing what he set out to do--it was not unintentional.
It seems like the 4chan poster knew enough about mathematics to recognize the stated problem as a mathematical problem and write a proof for it. That already demonstrates a degree of specialty and intention that makes "stumble upon" seem dismissive, to me. The fact that they didn't know they were solving a a more general, already-known problem is irrelevant, IMO. It would almost be like denying them credit because they didn't fill out the paperwork correctly.
I have, for a long time, dismissed Scientific American as a pointless work of marketing. This article, on the other hand, makes me think I may be missing some things. The problem is stated in an interesting way that might be broadly understood and enjoyed. It gives some results that are explained well and easily understood. It also leaves some open questions that can be explored, letting the explorer dream about sett…
I used to be a subscriber for years a long time ago. I’m not sure where you got this opinion unless you are basing things on recent years. There was always something interesting in them.
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I've never really done it at any advanced level, but I think good "science communication for the masses" is just a really hard problem. I say that because it seems like there's an overwhelming amount of really bad science communication out there. You have creators like Veratasium on YouTube, who I think do really great jobs making a lot of science and mathematical topics interesting to nearly everyone, but there's al…
> I think good "science communication for the masses" is just a really hard problem. Not only is it hard, but there are tons of examples of hoaxes that spread like wildfire. The latest I can remember were the room-temperature superconductor papers.
I think that the problem is that there's effectively an infinite amount of science and it changes and updates all the time, so it's impossible to be truly "caught up" with everything, and most studies are already in pretty specific niche subjects that require a lot of understanding on that niche subject. Most people doing science communication can't possibly learn it all, and most certainly aren't equipped to call out fraud of bad science in a paper, so they have to take the papers at their word.
I mean, before I dropped my PhD, I was studying formal methods in computer science. I got reasonably good with state machine models in Isabelle, so you'd think I'd be competent with "formal methods" as a concept, but not really. If I were try and read a paper on, I don't know, "Cubic Type Theory with Agda", I would have to do a lot of catching up, almost starting from scratch, and I think I'm probably better equipped than the average software engineer for that. Even if I got to a state of more-or-less understanding it, I would certainly not be equipped to call out bad science or math or fraud or anything like that.
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I have visited the site, but mostly just hung around in /b/. I didn't really check out any of the other forums on there. I could be wrong, but I think that the average non-active-4chan-user associates 4chan primarily with /b/.
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> Why it would be something extra ordinary? You give screenshot, date... Journalists do it all the time: "evil X are attacking Y while doing Z". It's just funny. I usually associate 4chan as primarily shitposting. Memes and offensive-stuff-for-the-sake-of-being-offensive and porn. You don't generally see mathematical work being done on there.
Visited 4chan twice about 5 years apart, saw CSAM both times. I have an absolute hatred of the place rightly or wrongly.
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> It does make me wonder how much hidden knowledge is hidden in parts of the internet That was the shining hope of the internet. "Information wants to be free" and now it could be available to anyone with a modem vs just in university or municipal libraries. Now, we have megasites that dominate the web's attention with very trivial and banal content that makes looking for that information nearly impossible.
Well, it's not as if that promise didn't come true. We do have the world's knowledge at our fingertips. It's more of a curation problem, and a natural result of a decentralized web. Wikipedia could be considered a "megasite", but I'd argue it's more valuable than a million independent sites.
Who knows what kind of weird mathematical or scientific things have been discovered by hobbyists and posted on some obscure forum thread or abandoned blog that wasn't appreciated by anyone?
Like, if someone had a proof for the Goldbach Conjecture, and for whatever reason posted about it on the WatchUSeek forums (just as a throwaway example), it could just lay dormant for who knows how long? The audience on WatchUSeek might not realize the significance of a such a discovery, and maybe not even the poster, so it doesn't get any recognition and just never gets picked up.
I mean, going with the example in the original post, I don't know much about Superpermutations (only a little after this post went viral), so if I had seen this 4chan post in the wild, I would just assume it's some guy doing a bit of math that I wasn't familiar with. I wouldn't be able to spot that this was actually a contribution to anything.
There's something unbelievably funny to me that actual mathematical papers have to cite a 4chan post. It does make me wonder how much hidden knowledge is hidden in parts of the internet; maybe this is the only genius mathematical thing we've found on 4chan...
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I have, for a long time, dismissed Scientific American as a pointless work of marketing. This article, on the other hand, makes me think I may be missing some things. The problem is stated in an interesting way that might be broadly understood and enjoyed. It gives some results that are explained well and easily understood. It also leaves some open questions that can be explored, letting the explorer dream about sett…