Hacker News Reader

I have no idea of the scale of this problem in math. Maybe you do.

The average scientific field has hundreds of journals. In Econ there are five to ten which matter. It’s too time consuming to read more than a small fraction of the work that comes out even in my own sub-field. I would have thought math was even worse but I don’t know the field.

View on HN

In math you have subsets of researchers who read each other's papers and work over a few decades to explore something, returning various nuggets and conclusions to the general body of mathematicians along the way until the whole thing is worked out. Eventually, in the most successful cases, the work is condensed into a book or something and a lot of people read it. It is a lot, perhaps thousands of times, harder to come up with theorems than it is to teach them, and atop that even harder to come up with broadly applicable yet effective conceptual systems (which can be introduced in a couple pages once you know which axioms are going to produce all the right facts later on), which is the basis for the whole enterprise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com