/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.6362663]

Are all the great mathematicians dead?

[Anonymous No.6362666]

Nah.
They just went to live on a farm

[Anonymous No.6362688]

No I'm not

[Anonymous No.6362690]

>>6362688
But can you prove that conjecture?

[Anonymous No.6362691]

Grothendieck is still alive.

[Anonymous No.6362694]

>>6362691
I'd like to grow some dick, if you get my meaning

[Anonymous No.6362710]

>>6362694
lel

[Anonymous No.6362722]

>>6362690
Yes

[Anonymous No.6362786]

>>6362694
So you can suck it?

[Anonymous No.6362794]

all the fancy shit lies beyond human ability
mark my words, the next great mathematician will be an artificial intelligence

[Anonymous No.6362834]

>implying dead

>>6362794

Artificial intelligence with even the slightest bit of creativity is decades(if not longer) away.

[Anonymous No.6362839]

>>6362691
He's like 80 something and living isolated in a mountain range. How can we be sure that he is still alive?

Anyone want to make an exploration journey to the Pyrenees?

[Anonymous No.6362842]

>>6362834
>greatest mathematician

He's OK but not the greatest in terms of novel contributions to the field.

[Anonymous No.6363119]

>>6362842
who are you to judge... -_-

[Anonymous No.6363173]

>>6362834
AI may be decades away, but how far away is the next great mind?

[Anonymous No.6363738]

[Anonymous No.6363748]

>2014
>pure mathematics

>still relevant


Kek*10E23

[Anonymous No.6363854]

>>6362663
Yes they all died with ancient Greece

Truly gods among men

[Anonymous No.6363858]

They had to die because they knew too much.

[Anonymous No.6363880]

>>6362842
exactly this

Tao is overrated

[Anonymous No.6363887]

>>6363880

Name a single mathematician alive who is greater.

[Anonymous No.6363892]

>>6363887
anon already did

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck

[Anonymous No.6363907]

>>6363892

>implying Growthondick still does math

[Anonymous No.6363926]

>>6363907
that isn't the issue, the issue is who is the greatest still alive

if OP meant mathematicians still doing math there would be no need for that "alive", as dead mathematicians are obviously presently terrible at doing math

[Anonymous No.6363933]

>>6363907
By that reckoning Tao is greater than Euler and Newton, neither of whom still do maths

[Anonymous No.6363934]

>>6363926

He's alive, but he's not a mathematician. He's a former mathematician.

[Anonymous No.6363948]

>>6363934
Like Newton and Euler then you ridiculous faggot.

[Anonymous No.6363951]

>>6363934
Why do we need to specify alive then, seeing as all dead mathematicians will be former ones?

>because tao being great fits with my pop-math love

[Anonymous No.6363954]

>>6363948

They were mathematicians to do death. Groty quit after a few years to become a SJW.

[Anonymous No.6363963]

>>6363954
>They were mathematicians to do death
What?

[Anonymous No.6363966]

>>6363963

*to the death

[Anonymous No.6363969]

Grothendieck makes Tao look like a Downs faggot. Any working mathematician knows Wiles, Hamilton or Swinnerton-Dyer are better than Tao.

[Anonymous No.6363973]

>>6363966
Newton wasn't, he descended into mysticism and running the royal mint. No idea about Euler, but math is a young persons game. Most retire from it.

[Anonymous No.6363975]

>>6363966
>citation needed

[Anonymous No.6363979]

>>6363969
>forgetting Demetrios Christodoulou

[Anonymous No.6363982]

>>6363966
Unless you die young like Galois, it's unlikely you will be a mathematician to the death

[Anonymous No.6363985]

>>6363969

>Wiles

>prove one theorem
>OMG GREATEST MATHEMATICIAN EVAR!

Seriously though, what has he done lately?

[Anonymous No.6363986]

>>6363982
but most are

[Anonymous No.6363988]

>>6363887
>>6363907
>>6363969
also Serre, Deligne, Atiyah, Langlands, Tate etc

basically anyone half-decent is above that downie

[Anonymous No.6364023]

>>6363986
>citation needed

>>6363985
he's proved more than one theorem, and he is over 40, the age when most mathematicians cease being productive

[Anonymous No.6364036]

>ctrl-f
>no Alain Connes

[Anonymous No.6364061]

>>6363985
He's still contributing to the theory of residuals and modular forms.
e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1991

[Anonymous No.6364065]

There's a pretty significant lag time between a great mathematician's active work and public appreciation or knowledge of such work.

Furthermore, since mathematics is an insanely large field today, it's most brilliant minds are often hard at work on important results that even other mathematicians will not recognize the significance of.

OP seems to imply that there is less genius about today...

I pose this: there's more genius than ever (Mostly because there's more people than ever with access to education), but the genius is more anonymous and cooperative in nature.

I think this is the trend in all academic fields.

When I'm at my university's library, I can't help but feel that somewhere in the thousands of volumes surrounding me are the answers to every question I've ever wanted to know.

I also dislike the question because of its direct association of mathematics with the notion of personal greatness.

The joy and stimulation inherent in any given subject exists as a result of something far greater than genius, and infinitely more spectacular than ego, which is a miserable, petty exercise not unlike the singular pursuit of material wealth.

[Anonymous No.6364069]

>>6362663

I figure a great mathematician to be one that a person would want to read a book about. So no.

There are living computer scientists whose lives are bookworthy though.

[Anonymous No.6364073]

>>6363858
I laughed so hard at this. You guys are fun.

[Anonymous No.6364089]

>>6364065
This requirement for specialization is a general problem in mathematics. For example, when I was doing my chem PhD, I could reasonably expect to pick up a paper by any other chemist and get at least a general idea of what was going on. However, my friends in math often struggled with understanding new developments even in their own subject areas. Partly it's notational: every little subfield uses different conventions, and if you're not intimately familiar with the prior papers on that particular branch of research, you're out of the loop. And partly it's just that there are so many branches of active research. One friend wrote a paper and told me that he'd be lucky if a dozen people in the community had the background necessary to fully understand all the details. At first I thought this was kind of cool, but he said that it's like that for nearly everyone.

But there's an advantage, pointed out by a friend who had to closely guard his research results. In biochem (his field), there are far more researchers than ideas. In math, there are far more ideas than researchers. So a biochem professor would have a dozen students all working feverishly on his one topic in absolute secrecy, while the math professors would be throwing out publishable ideas to anyone who would listen.

[Anonymous No.6364175]

>>6362663
Nope.

[Anonymous No.6366659]

>>6362663
I'm working on it. Give me time.

[Anonymous No.6366750]

>>6364175
honestly i haven't seen him do anything more advanced than linear algebra

[Anonymous No.6366758]

>>6366659
whats you're are our IQ?

[Anonymous No.6366785]

>>6366750
I haven't seen you do even that

[Anonymous No.6366865]

>>6366758
b^b

[Anonymous No.6366962]

I'm dead inside.

[Anonymous No.6367047]

>>6363738
I lol'd at filename.

[Anonymous No.6367050]

>>6362663
Technically, I am dead, so, yea, I guess so.

[Anonymous No.6367077]

pic related

[Anonymous No.6367099]

>>6362842
That's because all of the easy shit is out of the way.

We have tons of mathematicians out there more knowledgeable than the "greats", but most will never become widely known outside of mathematics circles. Some won't even become widely known inside mathematics circles. This isn't even taking into account how long it can take for a paper to really make an impact.

[Anonymous No.6367103]

>>6363926
>that isn't the issue, the issue is who is the greatest still alive

Surely he meant alive in Erdos sense of the word.

[Anonymous No.6367124]

no, talented people want jobs that pay good money

i'm quite talented in math, but i have zero interest in math research

i won some math contests but i made the decision to study engineering when i'm 16

[Anonymous No.6367128]

>>6367124
that verb choice makes you sound underaged b&

[Anonymous No.6367135]

>>6363892

So, reading his wiki and searching the net it seems he lost his mind, secluded himself, and then wrote someone a letter demanding that people stop publishing his works. It also seems that a bunch of websites that used to host past works or were working on converting some to TeX to republish them no longer host them.

What the fuck?

Does anyone by chance have copies of said work? It'd be a shame if it were lost forever because he thought people were being mind controlled by the devil.

[Anonymous No.6367142]

>>6363854
Please. The ancient Greeks are revered because of the shit they came up with, taking into account the information they already had at the time. It's like the ancient history equivalent of "Most Improved Student" from middle school. Their ability to establish mathematical fundamentals was impressive but the material itself is not ingenius by any means (relative to our modern time frame of course)

[Anonymous No.6367144]

Im still alive

[Anonymous No.6367159]

>>6367142
Actually, besides Archimedes, the ancient greeks didn't develop a whole lot of new math. The only thing Euclid did was axiomatize a ton of the geometric knowledge that existed at the time. Many of those things had already been known for millenniums before hand.

Archimedes developed his own primitive differential calculus and integral calculus 2000 years before Newton and Leibniz but after he was killed the palimpsests were lost. The only one that survived had been bleached and re-purposed as a prayer book by Christians during the dark ages.