Hacker News Reader

Comment by jswinghammer | Hacker News Reader

That site is crazy. Every time I open it I feel like a complete idiot. I took a decent amount of math in college but I don't know most of the words they use.

View on HN

If you just mean you took math courses as an undergraduate, then you should not at all feel like an idiot for not understanding what goes on at MO. The site is for "research-level math questions", as their FAQ says. My guess is that even, say, most PhD students tend to understand only the questions in areas of math they are familiar with.

Yeah. Don't feel bad. I have a graduate degree in pure math, and my comprehension level is only about 30%.

Math is an extremely fractured field at a high level. And so much of it requires getting your head around new and difficult concepts, you can't translate between subfields well.

Someone who speaks fluent Java stands a decent chance of decoding reasonably compex C++ or Ruby or whatever. I mean, some languages are way, way out there, but once you've been around the block a couple times, it's all just code.

Not so in math. A professional geometer talking to someone who does PDEs or complex analysis or topology . . . they have nothing in common. And it would take any of them years of study to close the gap.

I wonder if this is how non-programmers feel reading Stack Overflow.

That would be symmetric, but no, it's not the case. Most of the SO questions are of a more naive character. ("I got this error message, what do I do?")

Non-programmers know that they're not supposed to understand programming. People who've taken a reasonable number of math classes tend to feel like they should know more than a tiny fraction of the math that's out there, even if this expectation is unreasonable.

I know I found it pretty depressing the first time I realized that after taking fourteen or so years of math classes I'd never really made it past Advanced Arithmetic.

MO has become specialized in combinatorics, graph theory, and algebra; if you didn't go deep in these areas you may feel at a loss. But additionally, the level of formality and carefulness in discourse is considerably higher than SO or HN. It's more reminiscent of LTU.

> the level of formality and carefulness in discourse is considerably higher than SO or HN

Well, HN is pre-college kids arguing with those who went to college about whether it was worth it.

That argument sort of answers itself.

What? No, there's also plenty of algebraic geometry, category theory, algebraic topology, etc. Maybe not as often, but you can also find other topics, like differential geometry, set theory and logic, etc. What you feel it specializes in is probably a result of selelctive attention (depending on which questions you look at most), unless of course, you have some statistics to back up your claim (in which case, I'd still say there's enough activity in other fields for it not to matter).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com