Hacker News Reader

Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

> I feel insignificant just by reading the first phrase.

I often wonder about the intentions of those who post of these types of comments. Being charitable one might suppose the parent is offering a backward sort of compliment to the authors. Something like "Great job, beyond my capabilities, I'm glad someone is working on these things".

There are a lot of less charitable formulations; why should other readers care about parent commenters insecurity? Does parent commenter not appreciate the work that goes into studying these topics? Was parent commenter told they were "smart" to often as a child and never learned to exert themselves academically? Etc.

Although this post is mostly in jest, I really am curious what prompts these comments, comments of this type are quite reliable.

View on HN

> There are a lot of less charitable formulations; why should other readers care about parent commenters insecurity? Does parent commenter not appreciate the work that goes into studying these topics? Was parent commenter told they were "smart" to often as a child and never learned to exert themselves academically? Etc.

You're missing the obvious interpretation -- jargonization of the sciences keeps people out and keeps the masses stupid. Math is particularly guilty of this -- more charitable fields use jargon that is at least semi-self-explanatory, words and phrases that, while jargon, do make sense if you deconstruct them. In Math, people are so arrogant that they discover something and immediately name it after themselves, so if you haven't had a topology class, you won't know that X person's name maps to Y concept. Good jargon can be pieced together with pure reason alone without knowing the names of the people who invented what. This isn't true across the board of course -- "gradient descent" is a particularly well-named piece of jargon, for example.

People generally don’t name it after themselves; other people name it after them later.

Not that many people wouldn’t like for the thing they introduce to eventually be named after them. But, I think it would generally be considered presumptuous to directly name it after oneself.

I remember one story where one mathematician upon hearing something referred to as a [some term named after them], asked what the term referred to. (I want to say it was Hilbert asking what a “Hilbert space” was, but I’m not sure.)

The story is told by Saunders Mac Lane, quoted in the book Mathematical Apocrypha Redux:

> J. von Neumann in 1927 introduced the axiomatic description of a Hilbert space, and used it in his work on quantum mechanics. There is a story of the time he came to Göttingen in 1929 to lecture on these ideas. The lecture started "A Hilbert space is a linear vector space over the complex numbers, complete in the convergence defined by an inner product (a product <a,b> of two vectors a, b) and separable". At the end of the lecture, David Hilbert (by custom sitting in the first row of the Mathematische Gesellschaft), who was then evidently thinking about his definition and not about the axiomatic description, is said to have asked, "Dr. von Neumann, ich möchte gern wissen, was ist dann eigentlich ein Hilbertscher Raum?" [Freely translated this is "Dr. von Neuman, I would very much like to know, what after all is a Hilbert space?"]

https://books.google.com/books?id=8mBdvAjk_gQC&newbks=1&newb...

math at least has __nowhere__ near as much jargon as something like biology or the life sciences.

I think a larger problem in reading math might be polysemy. Symbols have multiple meanings, so context has to be used to infer what meaning is intended by authors.

It's also very difficult to google symbols, even in this post UTF-8 world

Reply on news.ycombinator.com