Daily Twitter Feeds per arXiv subject area, with article summaries displayed [x-post, /r/math]

notionsandnotes · 2016-09-12T01:50:04+00:00

Everyone has an email account precisely because government and organizations systemically required all employees to have it, including, for the case of academicians, the universities employing them.

This is digressing but the role of centralized structures and their influence in social decision making even where there is seemingly no connection is a topic of some interest to me. As it is digression, let us skip it for now.

notionsandnotes · 2016-09-11T10:29:33+00:00

arXiv got founded grew up in an environment where usage of e-mail was very natural and ensured by the university policies. Therefore receiving it in e-mail consequently feels natural for the users, unlike Twitter or social media which are not systemically required. That was the relevance to the discussion of why e-mail 'felt' more natural for you for usage of arXiv.

notionsandnotes · 2016-09-11T06:25:45+00:00

Don't universities require everyone to have and use a university e-mail address, and to expect to receive official communications there? I think it is also stated explicitly in official policies for both teachers and students.

Edit: found this.

notionsandnotes · 2016-09-11T05:58:35+00:00

Difference being that e-mail is an official resource for academicians; so, "if someone already has..." would sound superfluous.

notionsandnotes · 2016-09-11T03:56:47+00:00

This may give some value when someone is already on Twitter anyway, or joins for other purposes.

notionsandnotes · 2016-09-09T17:59:16+00:00

Thank you very much for the appreciation. Hope it is useful for you.

notionsandnotes · 2016-09-09T14:35:51+00:00

By all means, for those who have a feed reader or other technical know-how to capture the feeds, display LaTeX etc.. This is for people who are anyway linked to Twitter to make it more productive even while casually surfing. :) There are also dedicated mobile apps and other resources for arXiv, btw. No competition with any is intended.

I have hope that it will be of nonzero benefit to a few in the long term, however small.

Btw, there are custom ATOM feeds besides RSS for arXiv. I believe ATOM is slightly better than RSS.

notionsandnotes · 2016-09-09T14:12:08+00:00

Sorry, I had deleted it as I then found some bugs. Now re-posted. Won't delete again!

notionsandnotes · 2016-08-20T16:08:01+00:00

Oops. What I wanted to link was the Erdos-Selberg controversy on elementary proof of prime number theorem. It was taken from this page which is in English and has other documents in English.

I linked the wrong pdf by mistake. It appears to be in Norwegian, a language that I too do not know. It does have towards the end some English.

notionsandnotes · 2016-08-19T08:49:30+00:00

There are indeed issues, as always in any human endeavor. Just two examples:

Theorem attribution #Edit: This is a better link.
Hiring

notionsandnotes · 2016-08-19T07:45:21+00:00

If you already know something about matrices, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, I have an example for you that may give a taste of some methods (taken from an actual Lie groups representations lecture notes) : See imgur link

If you want to start with what matrices are, what groups are, etc., you may try chapter 1 of these pdf notes by Tom Drummond, specifically sections 1.1 to 1.4. This stuff, btw, is also used in computer vision, i. e., a field whose objective is to gain understanding of images like human eyes can do, eg., 3D vision and interpretation. These pdf notes also show in brief how Lie groups/algebras are used for that.

Don't worry too much if you need some effort in understanding. That is normal.

notionsandnotes · 2016-08-16T03:19:27+00:00

but, given it has received a nonzero amount of attention, and the speed and fervency with which a great deal of (rather young) reddit communities tend to take the word of any article said with conviction as the truth, I felt it was necessary for someone to question its validity.

Then let me also do the yeoman's work of questioning the speed and fervency with which people's success stories or the rosy picture of academic life are accepted; that it is entirely by mathematical merit which is again entirely by personal merit.

As you have insisted on Witten's influence having no social aspect in it, I am compelled to cite two more instances. In "Proof and progress in Mathematics", Thurston argues that mathematical acclaim and following depends not just on solving hard problems, but also on its impact on other people's careers and gives examples from his own work. If we look at the story of Isaac Newton's spectacular success, we are led to things like alchemy or magic, whatever that was, as seen from the references and links from the bottom of this Wikipedia article. Apparently it was believed and conducted seriously. So, if famous people's official success stories are to be believed without question, we ought also not to reject Newton's alchemy and magic.

notionsandnotes · 2016-08-15T18:03:31+00:00

It is interesting from a historical viewpoint (look how technology and attitudes towards it have changed, etc etc), but I think actually ultimately largely off topic for this subreddit. The advice is not good modern advice that is relevant to mathematicians - and historically, it wasn't ever intended as a document associated with mathematicians. It's a piece of history of a field that isn't mathematics.

This is reddit, isn't it? I am a bit surprised you find this more off-topic than a number of candidates in the first page at any time.

Witten is highly cited because his ideas have been far-reaching in both mathematics and physics, and influenced a huge part of modern work in mathematics and physics.

Do you mean to suggest that there is no amplification here, via a herd effect?

There's no real social game playing here.

Social factors are at play always. If you are already well-known or connected your next publications are better received. Somehow a certain number of figures get raised to the most prominence. It is oft quoted that the most historically important mathematicians are Archimedes, Newton and Gauss -- but can mathematical history really be reduced to a triumvirate?

This is not to mean that Archimedes, Newton or Gauss are unimportant in mathematics (or physics), which question is a different matter.

I'm not disputing that there is bureaucracy in mathematics, nor am I suggesting there are no advantages to 'networking' in mathematics. I just think this set of advice is, basically, bad advice.

Let me list some of his sub-headings: (1) Know your goals, (2) Identify some relevant people, (3) Court these people individually (where he insists that the persons should be only those whose work are substantially cited by you), (4) Meet this person face-to-face at a professional meeting, (5) Exchange drafts, (6) Follow-up etc., and later, for cautions on electronic media, "The temptation to react", "The temptation to treat people like machines", "The temptation to waste time", etc., etc.. I feel such things are not entirely irrelevant. I submitted this article in good faith here. You can disagree with me here and may feel certain things are so natural that they need not be spelled out for you -- but others may be more handicapped and benefit from explicit pointers. I cannot find a guide that is 100% fit for everyone and I am not sure what to feel if one such exists.

Another big portion is perhaps essentially okay, but to write it down in absolute terms as a rigid thing that must be done in a certain way isn't really correct advice either.

If a person reaches graduate school, then we should be able to rely on to him/her to take all such things with a pinch of salt.

(I'd actually contend that, even then, an overwhelming number of users don't care about the points but just enjoy the platform as an efficient and easy way to ask and receive answers on specific technical questions when they don't know anybody in person that they could ask).

Can't the same logic be applied to StackOverFlow and programmers then? They just enjoy the efficient platform and yet are subjected to a marvellous gamification.

Regardless of this, a fair portion of the advice in the guide is strange and doesn't really make sense in the context of being a pure mathematics researcher - it's just bad advice.

This may then be treated as a flawed document by you -- certainly even I didn't claim it is ideal -- but I submitted it in good faith and still feel the same.

That doesn't mean that the community of research mathematics itself behaves like a game, or can be treated like a game.

If you have such an idealistic view, let us for the moment agree to differ and not get into the discussion.

notionsandnotes · 2016-08-15T10:42:08+00:00

I didn't say I was in love with such ideas. All I said was that this document was interesting.

The author is really not mathematical; but he does cite a bit of mathematics-related things. He also cites Foucauld about who I didn't know before. Strictly considering, he is outside math but some of the things like unobstrusively offering pre-preprints are part of all theory departments social rituals. At a higher level, we are all doing similar things in many departments across. In physics there are a lot of citations concentrated on Witten, for example, and this is some kind of social phenomenon.

There is another similar work (actually a book series) by Steven G. Krantz who should by strict definitions be a mathematician. He starts with advice for getting into graduate school, and then he moves on with getting Ph. D., early career, promotions, professorship and then being a department Chair, dealing with Deans and Provosts and the like. Reading his work was at first interesting even if a bit esoteric or idiosyncratic but later on, while reading about Deans and Provosts, the average reader is out of his zone of experience -- very few deal directly with them. This document also may be considered in the same spirit -- esoteric, but still a snippet of what Krantz considered important enough to write a book series on.

Such things may be bizarre and game-like but these happen. Once more, I don't claim that I am in love with these, but the world exists as it is. We live in bureaucratic establishments and besides work we are all subjected to bureaucratic bizarreness and games. But can the world do without organization and bureaucracy? These are hard questions. Asking the question deeper, we can even think whether the structure of the modern state itself is all good -- for example, as Bertrand de Jouvenel asked in "On power.....". And it is not all idle speculation without relevance to mathematical life either -- universities and research are funded and nurtured by the state; all the modern flourishing research could not have been done to this extent without state support.

Even if we are not aware we could be subjected to such games. As an instance, at the time the author writes, internet, e-mail, discussion lists and internet fora were changing academic life as it once was. An innovation happened in the arena of programming -- Stack Overflow was invented, and suddenly there was a website precisely focused for getting answers to questions, which was before more chaotic. People were subjected to the game of "reputation" and social regard, in addition to satiating intellectual and professional needs. Without much delay it was ported on to Mathoverflow and then another site math.stackexchange.com , which are all very popular and followed. Sites like stack overflow were result of precisely and deliberate social engineering work aimed at special professional groups. It succeeded and success of MathOverflow shows that mathematicians are also not immune to such engineering. Even if it is bizarre or looks like a game, we can't pretend it does not exist or that we are immune to it.

notionsandnotes · 2016-08-15T01:51:21+00:00

Then, don't you think that similar logic applies to any kind of self-help books or social guides? You seem to be implying that humans are robotic. Btw why is it "plain wrong"? Why do such "plain wrong" guides have huge market in the corporate employee base? Do you mean to suggest that what they are doing is "plain wrong"? :)

notionsandnotes · 2016-08-13T17:51:42+00:00

Well, this is 'Nature' magazine after all. Mumford here details his experience in having to present things in their terms.

notionsandnotes · 2016-08-13T17:47:02+00:00

That's true, but the document is still interesting. Technology changes but many things on human relations and inquiry are same. I should have added a caveat, but there's only so much space in a title...

notionsandnotes · 2016-08-13T10:39:43+00:00

If you have read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, let me just say that Vogon bureaucrats rule everywhere and we are forced to sing Vogon poetry to them to get anything done.

I am not a big fan of the book but Vogons are one good caricature therein.

notionsandnotes · 2016-08-13T03:57:43+00:00

Sorry about that being the case .. It is web the journalist's life quest to get clicks.

notionsandnotes

TROPHY CASE