Mathematicians solve 60-year-old problem | Hacker News Reader

Mathematicians solve 60-year-old problem

phys.org

97 pointsghosh28 comments

http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.1603, version of the paper not behind a paywall.

The phys.org summary is light on mathematical details. The actual paper is very readable & if you have a math or physics background more understandable, e.g. the paper says six-wave interactions are responsible for "effective irreversible transfer of energy" but the phys.org summary leaves out "effective" (making the phys.org summary confusing IMO).

The described phenomenon remembered me of giant waves called rogue waves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave.

remembered → reminded.

Are you French?

Perhaps the GP meant 'remembered [to] me...'. That form still has some use in English, eg:

  Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
  Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
  Remember me to the one who lives there,
  For once she was a true love of mine.

This is something that could happen in Dutch, as we have one word for both.

Same in German: "sich erinnern"

as far as i'm concerned, remember (sth) is active and reflexive whereas remind sb (of sth) is passive, so it's not easily confused.

Same thing in Spanish.

I meant nothing negative by it. I was just curious.

Sometimes people have a small "accent" in writing even when their English is pretty good.

Germans sometimes write 'as' when they mean '(something) like' or 'than' because of the German word 'als'.

French and Germans sometimes write "I've been doing it since 12 years" instead of "I've been doing it for 12 years" because of the words 'dépuis' and 'seit'.

Danes usually mess up the verbs by getting the number and person wrong (because modern Danish uses the same form for all {singular, plural} × {1st, 2nd, 3rd} combinations). Spanish speakers sometimes leave out personal pronouns (because they can be inferred from the verb form in Spanish). And so on and so forth.

This is common in many languages. The other similar example being to learn -> to teach. I always hear foreigners (including me, Croatian) messing those up.

Lol, strange how my mistake produced it's own subthread here. And no, I'm german. In hindsight, it felt quirky but I didn't recheck that sentence.

What does French have to do with this? In French, it would read: "m'a rappelé" = "reminded me".

peterfirefly might be thinking of "se souvenir (de)".

It wouldn't make sense in the context of the sentence.

"Le phénomène décrit me souvient..." would sound wrong in the ear of a native french speaker.

Yup, but you need to take into account semantic confusion by a native speaker of one language with words in another language. In this case, peterfirefly might have been thinking of 'se souvenir (de)' and mkesper might have been translating 'se rappeler', but confused 'remind oneself' and 'remember', which is pretty easy to do and explains the mistranslation.

I don't know what actually goes through their heads but it is a mistake I have seen from French speakers before.

Visualization and background of the FPU problem: http://stemblab.github.io/fermi-pasta-ulam/

All I get is a blank page in both Firefox and Chrome.

Did you try disabling Adblock Plus? I have ABP and the page was blank for me until I disabled it.

Tried that; did not work.

Sorry, never seen that before (author here). Was there anything interesting in the console?

window.controllers is deprecated. Do not use it for UA detection. https-everywhere.js:326:0

Blocked loading mixed active content "http://puzlet.org/puzlet/js/puzlet.js"[Learn More] fermi-pasta-ulam

Use of Mutation Events is deprecated. Use MutationObserver instead. operator.js:1429:0

uBlock and HTTPS Anywhere both kill the page for me -> if you run anything like them turn it off.

Author here. Thanks for the heads-up. Had never occurred to me before ...

uBlock blocking third-party resources is IMHO something where I as the user have to expect pages breaking (although seeing at least something would be nice). For HTTPS Anywhere the problem is just that you get some of the scripts over http instead of protocol-independent URLs, which is easy to fix.

That is fantastic, thank you very much

After reading the solution presented, what strikes me is that there is very little new math in it. Before you jump down my throat let me explain as this is quite an impressive effort.

Equation 7 bears a striking resemblance to what you would get if you started with a Liouville vonNeumann equation and tried to solve it in time. Infact all of the equations seem to follow this path.

See for example the books: 1) Charge and energy transfer dynamics in Molecular systems by Volkhard May and Oliver Kuhn (chapter 2)

2) Chemical Dynamics in Condensed Phases by Abraham NItzan.

I find it a bit surprising to not see these in the reference material. Everything in this paper screams Liouville von-Neuman equation.

Is the generalization between one, two and three spatial dimensions straightforward?

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