Hacker News Reader

Comment by akavi | Hacker News Reader

If I had the mathematical background necessary to understand it, I certainly would.

... and I really wish I did have the mathematical background. Anyone have any recommendations on how to go from a standard CS undergrad math background to being able to understand proofs like these?

View on HN

This book is a good start http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Computation-Michae...

Sipser is great. Highly recommended. Working that book really accelerated my understanding. You can go from practically nothing to something with it, though it helps to have some discrete math.

As a compiler guy, I found that reading a lot of type theory papers helped me really get into the CS theoretical mindset, which made reading mathematics papers a lot easier. Writing a lot of Haskell code didn’t hurt. Oleg Kiselyov has some fairly approachable papers, as do Simon Peyton-Jones and Daan Leijen. Try searching for things on Lambda the Ultimate[1] if you’re interested.

[1]: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

Read it and google as you go. Math is one of the best covered topics online. For a potential millenium prize proof, it seems very approachable. That said, that's not saying much.

I am not sure I would consider it approachable, I am lost by page 3

I find math in some cases to be really hard to Google. Particularly with expressions that I don't know the names of; I never know what to use as search terms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com