121–128 of 128 posts
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Username sure as hell does not check out
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No, I'm saying that JvN would have recoiled hard from that sentiment.
His work was incredibly APPLIED. Which is precisely why he is remembered and lauded. Can anyone here not involved in theoretical math name 5 Fields Medalists? Take out Terry Tao or Andrew Wiles or Gigori Perelman and can you name any Pure Mathematicians from the last century at all?
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if work done on the behavior of vectors in high-dimensional space by Hong and her colleagues someday becomes relevant to practical neural-net R&D. You never know what you might need in the future, but it will suck if engineers have to stop and figure this stuff out from first principles when they do need it.
von Neumann did a lot of theoretical work, e.g. https://www.academia.edu/download/38046446/Ohta_15_von_Neuma... where he was hanging out intellectually with McCullough and Pitts. He not only wouldn't be surprised at the ANN renaissance under way now, he'd ask us what took so long. He even cited M&P in his EDVAC report. Way ahead of his time, envisioning how hardware that wouldn't be practical for another 80 years might work.
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Username sure as hell does not check out
You're misunderstanding my comment. The OP was amazed by people who can manipulate symbols on paper. Von Neumann would have been considered an incredibly POTENT wizard. He actually impacted the world.
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His work was incredibly APPLIED. Which is precisely why he is remembered and lauded. Can anyone here not involved in theoretical math name 5 Fields Medalists? Take out Terry Tao or Andrew Wiles or Gigori Perelman and can you name any Pure Mathematicians from the last century at all?
You see that https:// part of the URL in your browser? The 's' started out as pure mathematical research into elliptic curve cryptography based on algebraic geometry and number theory, a solution looking for a problem if there ever was one. When the problem eventually came along, the solution was obvious thanks to pure math. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if work done on the behavior of vectors in high-dimensi…
This is ahistorical. Elliptic curves had been around for a long time, but elliptic curve cryptography was applied from its birth in 1985. Also the reasons elliptic curves had been studied for so long (Mordell-Weil Theorem, Falting's Theorem, Sato-Tate, etc) didn't really have much to do with the reason it was proposed, which was that its group probably wasn't vulnerable to the same kinds of attacks as DH.
> When the problem eventually came along, the solution was obvious thanks to pure math.
Also ahistorical. ECC wasn't proposed until almost a decade after DHKE (possibly only that early because it was hot at the time thanks to Lenstra (https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~ajmeneze/publications/ecc.pdf)) and it took decades to get in common use. Doesn't seem all that obvious.
Scary stuff from one of the winners: "A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence" (Jacob Tsimerman, Andrew Critch) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09369
Jacob Tsimerman believes that AI will be better than human mathematicians within 2 years. We should not be surprised if AI solves the Millenium problems very soon and advances to a level that is barely comprehensible, or even incomprehensible, to the best humans. We can expect this not by curve fitting to recent progress but by reasoning from first principles about where the progress has come from (synthetic data, no…
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I used to do something similar (at a lower level), and my solution was to lie, just lie. A big part was about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_transform so my description was something like: I work in something related to Image Compression, so when the computer has to download the image from Internet it's smaller and use less data. Anyway, I study the mathematical part, not the programming part. The idea is that…
At least you are aware of the lies. I'm reminded of Feynman's refusal to lie about the nature of magnets ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q ): "You'd soon ask me about the nature of the [rubber] bands." Even in his digression about "why" questions, in giving a very high level reason for why ice is slippery he adds "they say ", since I suspect he knew at the time the usual explanation had problems, and only…
The main problem is that research is mostly about very specific details. Let's imagine the rounding of metallic nuts for screws, in a society where nobody has seen a nut or a screw. So when people ask, you have to say something like "I make bridges, actually a small part that keep them tight, actually I don't make them but I study how they are more resistant for exaple to corrosion. You are asking what is corrosion? Corrosion changes the color of bridges and they get weak an may fall apart." Notice that I never mention "rounding"! I probably need like half an hour to explain the relation between the rounding of the nut, the alloy, the salt in the sea breeze, the daily heat and cold cycle, and perhaps other things that may be relevant in my totally fictional example.
> Still I think honesty is a better policy, even if it's not as satisfying, and if departed from at least making sure both sides know there are convenient lies and oversimplifications.
Yes, you can call my description an oversimplification. It's hard to keep a balance and make a nice explanation that last less than 30 seconds before people get bored.
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> Ooh, one of them likes lesbian fanfic Oddly. specific. Sorry, I don't get the reference, could you please tell me what/who does that refer to (which fanfic and person, and why said person and fact is relevant to this question)
It was a reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49031519 . Not a topic I know anything about.
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Ed Zitron should write his newsletter with LaTeX and publish them as PDFs in arxiv. Seems to make the techbros automatically take it seriously. Maybe that's what it takes to pop the bubble.
Whether or not Ed is right, he doesn't take any criticism, but peer review is a fundamental tenet of actual science. Vs being a blowhard on the Internet and getting paid for it.