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Some comments on the math subreddit by some folks going through the proof in case anyone with a more formal background is interested:

https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/zruc58/221209835_a_no...


This issue has been talked about quite a bit over the past few years and to me it comes down fundamentally to incentives academics have to keep churning papers because that's what they get measured on. Of course the good thing about that is that you can change the incentives, just as how science funding changed significantly post WW2, but I'm afraid just like in many problematic areas of society nowadays there is a large group of people who benefit from this situation and are hence hostile to any sort of change. As such if change does come I think it will have to be top down rather than bottom up.

For an interesting perspective the physicist Murray Gell-Mann spoke on similar issues in a 1997 interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQGjsWiA_mM


Dirac came from a later generation than Einstein. For example during Einstein's annus mirabilis (1905) I doubt very many physicists knew of tensor calculus considering it was only developed a decade beforehand. During that time the mathematics physicists learnt was very much the traditional topics of analysis: series expansions, special functions, integral equations, calculus of variations, quadratic forms and of course partial differential equations. Hilbert himself actually wrote a textbook with Richard Courant covering these topics: Methods of Mathematical Physics. As such I don't really think many physicists of Einstein's generation knew lots of mathematics simply because it wasn't taught at the time. In the decades since physicists gradually has generally become more "mathematised" so to speak. In Dirac's generation tensor calculus and group representation theory became important, than in general abstract algebra and functional analysis, then as differential geometry became more well developed that gets taught and closer to the modern day you can find top theoretical physics students learning all sorts of abstract mathematics like algebraic topology.


This reminds me of how Terence Tao almost failed his orals at Princeton. Turns out even the best in the field need to spend lots of time doing hard work.

https://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/tao_terence

https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202007/rnoti-p1007.pdf (less technical)


I'm reading on the zlibrary subreddit that supposedly there were some popular (>300k views) TikToks going around showing that you could use z-lib to get free books. https://torrentfreak.com/tiktok-blocks-z-library-hashtag-pen...

I wonder if this is related.


I much doubt it. This seems like the type of thing that would take a while to set up, and that article was posted less than a week ago.


Related:

https://www.crn.com/news/security/zscaler-ceo-major-eu-inter...

Title: Zscaler CEO: ‘Major’ EU Internet Cable Cut Was ‘Act Of Vandalism’

Most incidents of cuts in internet cables usually have benign causes but given recent hostilities it's worth keeping an eye on whether these incidents start becoming far more common than they have been historically.


I for one think this could be a very useful idea for my use case (education) and am looking forward to see how it turns out.


> This also holds for small things like atoms. They are mostly empty space, too

Not quite so simple, see: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/126512/why-doesn...


Well that's what we would like to think of ourselves.


That's covered by "self-selected."


Self-identified seems more fitting?


On another thread that didn't receive the same attention as this one we learn the Twitter has Chinese and Indian government agents amongst their employees.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32825670


And that execs simply don't care:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32832796>


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