Reading the descriptions of their work makes me think of magic. It's an understanding of the principles of math and physics at a level above almost everyone on the planet - these are modern wizards.

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BeetleB 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The description of Yu Deng's work should be accessible to someone who's taken condensed matter physics in grad school.

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blovescoffee 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Is this supposed to imply that it's accessible?

	▲	BeetleB an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes - as in you have thousands, if not tens of thousands of folks around the world who can understand the general ideas of what was worked on.

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layer8 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Clarke’s third law.

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vonneumannstan 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Incredibly impotent wizards. Very little if anything they work on will have direct effects on the world.

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throwaway_7274 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This Fox has a longing for grapes:

He jumps, but the bunch still escapes.

So he goes away sour;

And, 'tis said, to this hour

Declares that he's no taste for grapes.

	▲	leonvoss 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		So now the Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital; and all the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, "Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor's new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!" in short, no one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit for his office. Certainly, none of the Emperor's various suits, had ever made so great an impression, as these invisible ones. "But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child. "Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another. "But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
	▲	lioeters 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The fox who longed for grapes, beholds with pain The tempting clusters were too high to gain; Grieved in his heart he forced a careless smile, And cried, 'They’re sharp and hardly worth my while.'

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leonvoss 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So overhyped. Yet they have no power but some prestige among nerds. The reason why it is bad is that the money/status is very limited relative to the amount of smart people. I would rather praise developments in quantitative sciences.

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orochimaaru 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not true. Novel mathematical methods precede their application by at least a decade and widespread use by about a century.

Calculus was invented in 1670, it was about 1680-1700 till it started actually being used in astronomy. The uptake was probably faster because at that time a lot of mathematicians were Astronomers as well.

There is a lot of mathematics created but we don’t yet know how to use it. My hope is that AI can bridge the search gap to accelerate this.

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leonvoss an hour ago | parent [-]

Quantitative scientists are also mathematicians. I'm not attacking mathematics, just probably-useless subfields. Is there any good quantitative evidence that actually estimates what percent of math work today will be useful? Because to me it seems like <1% and I feel like we could easily make that number a lot higher. Particularly I want to see massive improvements in quantitative social science; physics already gets a lot of attention so it wouldn't be able to see as much improvement to getting more resources but it could probably still get more.

	▲	orochimaaru 9 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think in social sciences it maybe more of an inability/reluctance of the domain group to use the mathematics as opposed to the mathematics being absent. Take category theory for example. The initial mathematics appeared in 1942. The application to social sciences started in about 1970 and I’m not sure of the level of uptake at the current time but a quick AI search says applications have accelerated in the past decade (needs verification).
	▲	yorwba 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What open problems in quantitative social science do you have in mind where better math could achieve massive improvements? I'd expect the bottleneck to be data availability nearly always.