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Comment by impendia | Hacker News Reader

I am a mathematician. My research concerns the distribution of discriminants of cubic fields. I doubt exceedingly that anyone without extensive training in math (other than my mom) would have any interest whatsoever in looking at my papers.

I have heard it complained that we scientists don't "talk to the general public" enough. I would very much welcome specific suggestions for how to do this. I would cheerfully invest time and effort in this kind of thing if I felt like people would be interested.

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I have heard it complained that we scientists don't "talk to the general public" enough. I would very much welcome specific suggestions for how to do this.

That's very commendable. I am a nonmathematician who has become a mathematics teacher as part of figuring out why so few learners in the United States succeed in learning mathematics well. Here are some examples for you.

Good mathematicians (some Fields medalists) with readable blogs:

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/

http://gowers.wordpress.com/

http://www.arsmathematica.net/

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/

http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/

http://wildaboutmath.com/

http://micromath.wordpress.com/

A list found by a Google search

http://www.onlinedegree.net/50-best-blogs-for-math-majors/

suggests more.

A few popular authors who are mathematicians write very approachable books about mathematics.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&...

Following links from links to the books by those authors will reveal other books by mathematicians who write for popular audiences.

Best wishes in gaining readers other than your mother (like me, for instance) as you communicate your interest in mathematics.

If you were to start a blog where you provide links to your papers (when allowable) along with synopses for those of us with only an engineering-level math background, you might be pleasantly surprised at how much interest your work attracts--particularly on places like HN. Please let us know if you decide to do so, and I'll be sure to bookmark you.

If you have only an engineering-level math background, the blog will have to explain what a field is, what a cubic field is, and what a discriminant (of a field) is, in every post. And it will have to do it briefly enough that you stay interested, and accurately enough that what follows is meaningful. This sounds to me like an impossible task.

Mathematicians do have the advantage that all their papers are open-access. If you're interested in math, you can cruise on over to arXiv and read 60 abstracts an hour.

"[...]the blog will have to explain what a field is, what a cubic field is, and what a discriminant (of a field) is, in every post."

At most once. Links are what the internet is for:)

Moving the explanations out of the blog posts into a separate page or pages makes the problem harder, not easier, because it keeps you from omitting parts of the background that aren't necessary to understand the relevance of some particular result.

If you want links, here they are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(mathematics)#Definition_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_field

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discriminant_of_an_algebraic_nu...

The thing is, those articles probably aren't brief enough for many people to stay interested, and they probably also don't go deep enough to make any particular one of impendia's results comprehensible. (And I'm also not sure if they're readable to people with only an engineering background in math.)

(In case you think I'm being snooty about engineers, I dropped out of college and have never published a theorem; instead, I have made my living writing software.)

Many people wouldn't stay interested; I'd say the vast majority wouldn't. But, after explaining those things to the extent that you thought was worthwhile, you ended up with 100 long term readers out of the x billion on the internet, I'd count that as a huge win, myself.

If the goal were to make it so the layperson could read and understand the paper itself, then yes, that may well be an impossible task.

But the OP's goal is simply to increase interest in his own work. Recurring concepts could be explained once somewhere and referred back to as needed, and the research and its implications could be elaborated on in far more detail than that given in the abstracts. This should not only be possible, but would likely be quite successful.

HN is a highly atypical community. People here usually care about learning.

In my math classes, the engineers were the biggest whiners regarding mathematics. "I don't care about meanings, just tell me what function on my calculator to hit".

I've tried to read Terry Tao's blog; I like more advanced mathematics. His blog is very interesting, I'm sure, but the jargon level is so far beyond my knowledge it might as well be Russian for the level of meaning I draw from it.

There are Science Cafes all over the world that have scientists give talks to laypersons: sciencecafes.org

Nerd Nite does the same thing, but with beer: nerdnite.com

Be a guest speaker at high schools in your area. Mike Merzenich graciously came to speak to my Neuroscience students, and they found it informative and inspiring.

Vi Hart does some really really neat math videos: http://vihart.com/

Above all, practice talking math to non-mathies. Use lots and lots of analogies, and don't forget to tap into the enthusiasm that brought you to the field in the first place.

Do you know how to be a guest speaker at high schools? Do you just cold call people?

Yes, you could do that. The department chair is probably your best bet. You could also network if you know any teachers. Are you in SF?

It's nice if you can build a relationship between your institution and a school so you can have a sort of standing gig every few years.

(Also note that some schools will totally love this and others might be unresponsive, so don't give up if the first one doesn't happen)

And this silo, where even extensively trained mathematicians of other fields can barely understand each other is a large part of the problem. This is not aimed at you but a general problem. It is a real bottleneck. An inefficient use of resources resulting in inconsistent use and re-appropriation of notation, making each field have its own dialect and general slowing of the field. People keep rediscovering the same things in their fields that the other knew decades ago. Alot of data, much less information.

The kind of progress where an engineer or scientist takes what they need from that obviously useless piece of mathematics becomes harder and harder as the silos get deeper. But things are getting better. Stuff like mathoverflow, blogs by researchers, polymath are really helping bridge those gaps. Thats why these days people are really starting to see all this stuff that we thought unrelated are actually just different aspects of the same thing. I especially like whats going on with category theory, information theory, information geometry, entropy and bayesianism. Together they leave no subject untouched. Not one.

Hello all, thanks for your interest. To answer some of the comments --

First of all, my interest is not so much to increase interest in my own work. My work is pretty modest compared to the likes of Tao and Gowers, so really I would be happy just to represent the mathematical community and discuss the field I work in as a whole.

I think kragen's comments are essentially correct. I could do a good job of explaining what I do, and why it is interesting, to someone with an engineering background in about five to ten pages. IMHO that is a lot of effort required to either write or read. Of course my impression of HN is that there are indeed people who would not begrudge the effort to read it!

The suggestions have revolved around blogging. I confess that I don't have so much of a taste for this -- I spend a lot of time at a computer as it is, and there are already outstanding math blogs online as pointed out by tokenadult. I would be much more excited to do something that involved face-to-face talk. So perhaps my request is more difficult than the initial impression I gave!

Thanks to all.

I have to admit, I don't know that I'd be willing to put in the effort myself unless you first persuaded me why cubic field discriminant distributions were so much more interesting than the other thousand things I could spend the next hour reading about. (Or listening to you about.) This would indeed be much easier face-to-face.

I don't think that means the work is unimportant, but I think of math as being primarily a recreation like painting or singing, and only secondarily something that needs to be of service or interest to others.

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