HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s
hessix.com
hessix.com
I would have posted my paper there but I guess "@math.ohio-state.edu" isn't elite enough so I'll post it here and probably get more traction than all the papers on OP's entire site combined.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2869.pdf "Infinite graphs in systematic biology, with an application to the species problem" (printed in Acta Biotheoretica). This paper is as fun as a barrel of monkeys. Its results are mind-blowing even though the math is approachable. By the time you finish the first section, you'll be thinking to yourself, "Charles Darwin should have been a computer scientist!"
I do think the ideas in the paper are pretty cool! One question: have you considered or attempted some sort of generative models based on this system? You'd have to do some clever symbolic manipulations to deal with the "infinities" that crop up, but it seems like it could be interesting.
Only universities in the United States have emails that end in .edu. Most of the universities in the world have domain names that end with their respective country code.
Not strictly speaking true. Univeristy of Toronto (Canada) will give you a toronto.edu email if you're a CS student (even undergrads) or faculty.
Uh, since the site is for "math/stat" and there have to be rates of false positives, that people are already complaining about, and false negatives, I don't see people complaining about spam, then we're into statistical hypothesis testing, right? Sooo, to do better on the rates of false negatives, we want more data for a more powerful test. Sooo, we need a multi-variate test. Since no way can we justify assuming probability distributions for all the relevant data, we need a distribution-free test. So, where can we find one of those???
Disclosure: This question is just an exercise. For an answer, I published one of those. So, it's an applied probability calculation based on an algebraic group of measure preserving transformations! It may be a rationalization of resampling theory. Crudely the result is obvious, but a proof is tricky. It may be that the work is a stimulation for and or connection with approximate independence, e.g., maybe as in some work of Choquet student M. Talagrand.
And what about those that never were in academia? Mathematics has a long history of participants that were never formally educated (ironically Ram is even mentioned in the username section). Plus, being such a niche topic (especially one that a lot of people were taught to fear), I doubt that there'd be much abuse. Evidence of this belief is that Wikipedia has great math pages. Ones that many times are better than Wolfram's MathWorld, which can be too concise.
Also, one of the many nerds across the street in University Hall says hello :)
Tennant isn't my advisor, but I've taken a handful of classes with him, and his "holistic" (that's the best descriptor I can come up with atm) approach to teaching logic and philosophy of science makes everything fall into place in my head. His pleasant, informal teaching style combined with a skill for connecting big ideas across disciplines is seriously pedagogical magic.
And I'm currently a senior, hoping to wrap everything up by this summer. :)
FWIW, they gave me an account when I emailed them and told them I'm in that situation.
A better post format:
Title: not the title of the paper (which will almost always sound super specific) but something more general
abstract: a brief description at a high level of the discussion the poster hopes to generate, i.e. why.
Probably they should all be text posts with some ability to add an external link.
Also, posting some blogs would probably fare better for general discussion than just papers.
I think it's a little weird on HN, and I can see why it seems like some of them are out of place even on a specialized math forum.
It's also just not meant for discussions; if there are more than a couple comment replies, they "move it to chat", which I've never used.
Specific forums or subreddits can often have good discussion, but often not as much traffic.
If the StackExchange sites provide an allied discussion forum where I can specify what level of users I want posting on my thread that would be great.
Where level can be verified grad/phd in subject X or anyone who has more than N accepted answers in subject X...
Come on CS folk make it happen.
Right now I have to wander around labs and conferences to find the right people and have these discussions. A gigantic waste of time when most of these folk hang out on MathOverflow but can't have these disccusions.
Most of the progress in science came through 2-3 people finding and corresponding with each other. Here we are at a moment in time, where we don't need to find just 2-3 people.
We can find ever single one whether they are sitting in Cambridge or Congo and lay out a subject before them and yet we haven't got that to work right.
I think if you asked most academics their opinion on this (in math/CS at least), they'd tell you they think the system works fine. They don't really have problems collaborating - their universities send them to conferences where they meet people working in the same (narrow) subfield as them.
I think this is a matter of preference. I see where you're coming from, and there's a lot of value in that kind of unrestricted brainstorming, but I've always preferred to have those types of discussions in person with some whiteboards available for fleshing out ideas. When I'm brainstorming, I don't want to get caught up in LaTeX formatting issues, or to spend an hour writing out a response, only to have the discussion go in a completely different direction within that hour.
I enjoy reading MathOverflow because the Q&A format forces the question asker to take whatever vague idea they have and form it into an objective question that can be rigorously proven or refuted. The narrow focus keeps the discussion on topic, so even if it takes you a while to contribute, you can be assured that your response will still be relevant.
Not everyone has people to talk to in person that understand their subfield. In a small institution it might be 100 miles to the nearest person who could converse fluently in what it is you're thinking about, even if thousands of them exist.
It’s true that there’s lots of discussion that is out of the scope of mathoverflow which doesn’t have a centralised place to go on the internet. Such discussions tend to live on blogs and forums and email lists and discussions at conferences
If you want people who don't have and aren't trying to obtain a PhD to participate, I think you should say so explicitly.
For a point of reference, I've been thinking lately about the value a mathematician in a research career gets from blogging (I am thinking specifically about researchers and /not/ people focused on primarily education or popularization oriented careers). My conclusion is that the answer is "not much." Apart from a few small blogging communities and very famous mathematicians' websites, most math blogs get very little or no engagement that would be valuable to their career. Time is much more efficiently spent working closely with the people in your immediate spheres or focusing on making connections with specific researchers you want to collaborate with in the future.
I think for something like HN to be broadly interesting it needs volume and variety, because people’s interests are a long tail phenomena. I imagine that is probably true for maths too.
No, not at all. Each maths researcher will understand (and care about) only a fraction of these. Maths research (like most subjects) is broken into highly specialised subfields, and experts in one often cannot readily understand research in others.
New research papers are the cutting edge of the field, pushing out the boundary between known maths and unknown maths, and this boundary is huge. Things there are understood by very few people, at first just those who developed them, and the prerequisites for understanding any individual area of new maths are substantial. Known maths is also huge, far too big for any one person to understand it all.
Source: have maths PhD.
Academics as a whole doesn't really tackle the issue of taking knowledge and bedding it down into digestible form. Individually a lot of people do great work, but as a body they don't seem to see as that as their role. So far the solution is to throw clever people at academic papers and assume they will sort out something comprehensible as they go.
It always struck me as a very hard, very high-value problem. How do we measure ease-of-learning in a systemic way? Can we cheaply and reliably rate one explanation of a topic as superior to another of the same material?
Academic papers aren’t meant as a static store of knowledge in digestible form for outsiders. They are an ongoing conversation between experts. In his way they do assume h reader has done the work to follow along.
Eventually the good bits mostly get worked into digestible form, usually by the mechanism of seminars first, then in courses.
One can argue that there isn’t enough incentive to go past working up a seminar, and especially produce generally approachable material which is a lot of work and typically doesn’t pay at all.
The issue of the approachability of papers is similar. There is currently negative incentive for this. Some people are naturally better at it, but mostly if you are spending extra time on this it won’t help your (academic) career at all, and it might hurt.
I think we need to stop conflating maths and abstraction with genius and general intelligence: it's too important to be politicised. I also think we should assume that any healthy adult can learn to do maths well by virtue of nothing other than having a human brain. If the normal healthy adult does not do maths well then that should be treated as a pedagogical problem rather than a reason to stratify society.
I think that maths in many ways can be treated analogously to language, and I think what we need to do is express maths in a way better suited for normal human language faculties. I very much like the artificial language Lojban as an architecture ingraining combinatorial and first-order logic into regular self-expression. Imagine speaking Lojban your whole childhood and having this rich vat of lived logical analogies to draw on when learning.
Effecting minds in this way and focusing on median improvements in the functionality of the majority is in my opinion has many many times more potential than any sort of elite screening or stratifying programme.
To use Neural Networks as a poor analogy. Given identical training data and different random starting weights you end up with different end results. Thus, even with identical potential at conception people would end up with different strengths naturally.
Better training clearly shifts the median, but when you start talking about populations of extreme outliers from a billon+ people that’s going to be meaningful. Especially as differences compound over time.
Currently their is a trickledown effect where useful techniques end up shifting the landscape. RSA encryption pushing little bits of what would otherwise be abstract number theory into a few high school classrooms etc.
We already use a subjective measure for rating explanations. It's called elegance. Academics tend to prefer shorter, more elegant proofs in my experience. It just takes a long time to get there. If you want to understand the latest research, you have to be a specialist in that subject area. Even the elegant proofs can require years of study before you have enough background knowledge to understand the concepts needed to make it digestible.
You don't any users, you have an incredibly tiny niche, and starting a new forum these days is already ultra hard.
You should be working on getting users at all costs, not planning for the glamorous problems you might have if your moonshot happens to land, like having too many math novices cluttering up the high brow academic discussion.
lol, c'mon.
You need to understand that right now your forum is about as enticing as installing vBulletin on localhost to talk to yourself, just without the arxiv.org bot.
I started a large forum over a decade ago when it was easier. I spent almost a year sockpuppeting with myself so the first users didn't arrive at an empty forum. And that was in a popular forum-faring niche.
I look at your forum and you couldn't even be bothered to write a single comment on launch day. What's the plan?
As for affiliation, make it optional. Affiliated users get a little icon next to their username.
I don't know if Hessix was meant to include people like me, but I would really love to be a part of it.
You'd be discriminating against everyone with a DPhil and not doing research in a university ;)
I'm neither so I guess I shouldn't bother.
For papers from all disciplines
Not all math doctorates have university e-mails.
(It's too bad that it is limited only to people in Maths PhD programs.)