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Comment by linguaz | Hacker News Reader

Such a wonderful piece. I'd not heard of Julia Robinson or Yuri Matiyasevich...what a touching story of two people forming a friendship across time, place and culture.

> Julia thought of mathematicians “as forming a nation of our own without distinctions of geographical origins, race, creed, sex, age, or even time (the mathematicians of the past and you of the future are our colleagues too) — all dedicated to the most beautiful of the arts and sciences.”

The mathematics is way over my head, but I find this inspiring & would love to see how we might discover/co-create realms beyond such distinctions in other endeavors.

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I liked this quote too, though I wonder if it's not more out of necessity and the special nature of math than anything else.

Mathematicians speak languages non-math people can't grasp, so they gravitate toward and connect to one another.

Math simply doesn't advance without promiscuous sharing of ideas. Soviet censors notwithstanding, there's certainly a reason correspondence like this was permitted even during the Cold War.

You could say that the above is true of other sciences, but I imagine falsification of results in math is extremely difficult or just impossible. So math is mostly immune (I suggest) to the politics and protectionism that inevitably emerges around fuzzy and controversial scientific disciplines.

Just look at the good faith Julia has in her treatment of Chudnovsky's work. Even the skepticism is respectful.

> I imagine falsification of results in math is extremely difficult or just impossible.

Another quote I like from this piece: “No one can be a charlatan mathematician for long”.

If only that were true in certain other domains.

gregory chaitin has an accessible version of the math, if you’re interested. he builds a LISP with it.

Thanks for the pointer to Chaitin, his writing seems approachable:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4471-0307-3_...

https://inference-review.com/article/doing-mathematics-diffe...

> he builds a LISP with it

cool, just found these:

The Limits of Mathematics---Tutorial Version : https://arxiv.org/abs/chao-dyn/9509010

An implementation of his Lisp, written to explore the above Tutorial : https://github.com/poppingtonic/chaitin-ait

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