Remix clone Hacker News

I used to judge myself for not understanding everything in math articles on Wikipedia, but as time has gone on I've realized that their purpose isn't really to be an introduction, but a reference. Especially as the topics become more esoteric. So they're not really there for you to learn things from scratch, but for people who already understand them to look things up. Which is why you'll sometimes see random obscure & difficult factoids in articles about common mathematical concepts.

(don't have any examples on-hand atm, this is just my general perception after years of occasionally looking things up there)

▲

kristopolous 5 days ago | parent [-]

I've heard that and I think it's silly. They handwave away why nothing should ever be explained. Wikipedia doesn't work like that for any other topic.

You'll see something like a mathematical proof with no explanation and it's end of article. The edit history will have explanations aggressively removed.

The equivalent would be the article for say, splay tree, to have no diagrams and just a block of code - feeling no obligation to explain what it is or if you looked up a chemical and it would just give you some chemical equation, some properties and feel no obligation to tell you its use, whether it's hazardous or where you might find it... Or imagine a European aristocrat and all that is allowed is their heraldry and genealogy. Explanations of what the person did or why they're important are forbidden because, it's just a reference after all.

Nope, these math people are a special kind of bird and I'm not one of them.

▲

Tainnor 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don't know anybody who first learns about new mathematical ideas from Wikipedia. Mathematics is a body of knowledge, not just simple isolated theorems or definitions. You learn new mathematics from textbooks.

Even for reference purposes there are often better resources. E.g. proofwiki is usually better for looking up proofs because the proofs and definitions are interconnected.

▲

kristopolous 2 days ago | parent [-]

If I run across a term like "bialgebra" while doing work, I don't always have the leisure time to derail my life and sign up for a 4 month class at a local university. Sometimes, I just need to move on with my task at hand and get something working.

I'm familiar with the mathematician response to this, I've heard it before and I fundamentally disagree with it. At work last week I gave someone a crash course in the simplex method and linear programming in about 30 minutes and it was a good-enough explanation that I came back in a few hours and the code was right.

This isn't impossible. There's just some wild apprehension that I'll never understand which insists everything is a grueling 1,000 hour journey to some kind of valhalla of enlightenment so you can bask in some aesthetic beauty of how perfect math is, as tears drip down from your cheeks, or something like that.

I mean come on now. Sometimes all you want is the cliff notes.

	▲	Tainnor a day ago \| parent [-]
		Well, you're comparing a concrete algorithm from applied mathematics (simplex) to a term from abstract algebra. I'm not exactly sure how you'd expect such a general concept to be described. Where in your work do terms like "bialgebra" regularly come up and is "it's some sort of algebraic structure" not enough of an understanding to continue without digging into the details? Maybe your problem is with people who put abstract mathematics into applied material without motivation or explanation and not with research mathematicians themselves? Would you expect to be able to read the "cliff notes" on French and then be able to read Camus in the original? That's what I mean by "body of knowledge" as opposed to individual facts.