/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.6972129]

>child prodigy
>a staggering mathematical genius
>had written three books on particle physics by the age of 13
>at age 15 he began to research in applied quantum field theory and particle physics and published his first scientific paper
>at age 18, working independently, he published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production
>received his PhD in particle physics at age 20, his thesis committee included Feynman
>founder of Wolfram Research, Inc.
>created Mathematica
>invented a new mathematical field, cellular automata
>made pioneering work on knowledge-based programming
>has a periodic element named after him
>wrote Wolfram Alpha, probably the greatest web application ever created
>author of 'A New Kind of Science'
You will never be this alpha

[Anonymous No.6972149]

>>6972129
>author of 'A New Kind of Science'
You make that sound like a good thing, in reality "A New Kind of Science" is what you get when you have someone who has never been told they're wrong.

[Anonymous No.6972159]

>Heaviside coined the following terms of art in electromagnetic theory:

admittance (December 1887);
conductance (September 1885);
impedance (July 1886);
inductance (February 1886);
permeability (September 1885);
permittance (later susceptance; June 1887);
reluctance (May 1888).

>Heaviside also reportedly started painting his fingernails pink and had granite blocks moved into his house for furniture

>looks like a creep

fuck off amateur

[Anonymous No.6972163]

"Dear Wolfram:

1. It is not my opinion that the present organizational structure of science inhibits "complexity research" - I do not believe such an institution is necessary.

2. You say you want to create your own environment - but you will not be doing that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in - but you will not be working in this environment - you will be administering it - and the administration environment is not what you seek - is it? You won't enjoy administrating people because you won’t succeed in it.

You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way.

Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my friend.

Sincerely,

Richard P. Feynman"

[Anonymous No.6972164]

>>6972149
Agreed, when you only have 2 peers in the entire world studying your super ultra-abstract physics paper on ultra-sub fine super field substructure vector n-space nanoparticle cluster neck manifolds, it's very difficult to be proven wrong; especially when you're 50 layers of assumptions have been abstracted to such a degree that the English language semantics are incredibly vague and call into question the entire logic system itself.

I'm not mocking his unique intellectual abilities, but when you start worshipping people as intellectual gods you create a situation where the establishment crucifies those who don't believe the earth is the center of the Universe.

[Anonymous No.6972171]

>>6972164
I would also like to argue that part of science is communicating your work to laymen so that their children and the children of those children can understand your unique accomplishments. I feel that modern physics (at least in America) and mathematics beyond group theory have done an incredibly sub-par job in this regard.

[Anonymous No.6972180]

>>6972171
Math and Physics like to take an indoctrination approach to their work. You learn by being indoctrinated into the current theories,methodologies and because you haven't been told that there are assumptions underlying everyone's theoretical framework you take these as being ultimate truths of the universe. It's to the point where physics is no longer concrete science (string theory) and math is just intellectual/semantic word play jibberish (most everything you encounter beyond group theory), trying to prove theorems built on 100 layers of unstated assumptions.

[Anonymous No.6972198]

>>6972180
It's like you've never read a textbook before.

[Anonymous No.6972208]

>>6972198

Engineering textbooks are laid out completely differently than a typical math/physics textbook at the Masters school level this becomes increasingly self evident.

Generally there is an introduction to some sort of mechanical system- engines for example. Then there is a discussion on various engine systems, how these systems work, what are the developments etc. Then there would be a discussion about how we can relate the energy conservation laws to these systems, but it's not done in a dogmatic approach and the assumptions are ALWAYS stated because the science of the "real world" is imperfect. We don't just say "if we assume the engine is a perfect sphere in a complete vacuum" - that's just not how engineering education is done.

[Anonymous No.6972213]

>>6972208
I have never had that problem, perhaps you should read more as it sounds like your big problem is that you don't understand what has been written.

[Anonymous No.6972221]

>>6972208
I've never read a hard science textbook that I would ever describe in any way as even remotely dogmatic. I have no idea what you're on about.

[Anonymous No.6972230]

>>6972159
>we learn maxwell's "equations"
>they're actually heaviside's
>mathematicians were endlessly buttmad about his operational calculus
>muh rigor
still a sore spot on mathematicians' behinds

[Anonymous No.6972232]

>>6972163
wow really?

[Anonymous No.6972246]

>>6972208
>there hasn't been direct advancements in every field of technology because of highly abstract views of quatum.
>because these views are highly abstract, photo-sythesis and electron microscopes aren't in the grasp of human technology
>meta-materials don't exist

this is what I'm hearing. Just because there are 10000 layers of abstraction don't say anything about how valid the theorems are. many theories is quantum topology are super abstract yet yield viable solutions to real-world problems. When they succeed, we at least have a good idea that they are correct or a good approximation to reality.

[Anonymous No.6972255]

>>6972129

[Anonymous No.6972259]

>>6972164
>you're

[Anonymous No.6972263]

>>6972255
Oh dear, I miss the thread that had so many of these kind of quotes

[Anonymous No.6972265]

>>6972213
It's possible that people have suggested for me to read the wrong kinds of books. But every single math book above group theory that I've picked up (apart from computer science textbooks on cryptography) start out with an incredibly dogmatic approach. Compare say a typical course on Finite Element Analysis or Computational fluid dynamics with a textbook on Riemannian manifolds. One truth becomes self evident, 100 layers of theorems or assumptions later and you're left wondering why the hell you even started reading the book in the first place.

>>6972246

1000 layers of abstraction leaves rooms for 1000 layers of misinformation, misunderstandings, mistranslation and Ockham's razor.

[Anonymous No.6972271]

>>6972163
never delved deep, but i didn't know wolfram and feynman had any correspondence. interesting

[Anonymous No.6972277]

>>6972263
faggots seem to make one every three days so just lurk more

[Anonymous No.6972278]

>>6972208
Maybe lower level math textbooks do what you've said, but pick up any upper level undergrad or graduate textbook in mathematics and you'll find your axioms. If this isn't what you're talking about then I do not understand.

[Anonymous No.6972281]

>>6972129
>he's a transhumanist

http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/stephen-wolfram-immortality-humans-live-forever.html

[Anonymous No.6972285]

If I want to do research in the area of "mathematical physics", is it better to do a phd in physics or in math?

[Anonymous No.6972307]

>>6972278

"...classical logic was abstracted from the mathematics of finite sets and their subsets...Forgetful of this limited origin, one afterwards mistook that logic for something above and prior to all mathematics, and finally applied it, without justification, to the mathematics of infinite sets. This is the Fall and original sin of [Cantor’s] set theory ..." (Weyl)

Modern mathematics doesn’t make complete sense. The unfortunate consequences include difficulty in deciding what to teach and how to teach it, many papers that are logically flawed, the challenge of recruiting young people to the subject, and an unfortunate teetering on the brink of irrelevance. If mathematics made complete sense it would be a lot easier to teach, and a lot easier to learn. Using flawed and ambiguous concepts, hiding confusions and circular reasoning, pulling theorems out of thin air to be justified ‘later’ (i.e. never) and relying on appeals to authority don’t help young people, they make things more difficult for them.....If mathematics made complete sense then the physicists wouldn’t have to thrash around quite so wildly for the right mathematical theories for quantum field theory and string theory. Mathematics that makes complete sense
1
tends to parallel the real world and be highly relevant to it, while mathematics that doesn’t make complete sense rarely ever hits the nail right on the head, although it can still be very useful."
- NJ Wildberger

I'm sorry, but apart from "Advanced classical mechanics", a couple of books on Number theory, and books on optimization/iterative methods/statistics/cybernetics; I've honestly never encountered a math book that wasn't dogmatic. Math text books that put out 100 axioms that are supposedly "self evident" before proving something verge on being intellectually insulting, speaking particularly (but unfortunately not exclusively) about upper level set-theory material.

[Anonymous No.6972311]

>>6972307
>Modern mathematics doesn’t make complete sense

Translation:

>"I don't understand modern mathematics"

[Anonymous No.6972313]

>>6972311

But it's a quote from NJ Wildberger, who has a Phd in mathematics.. :p

[Anonymous No.6972317]

>>6972307
I'm not sure what you're talking about (another anon here.) First, why many guys don't understand mathematics is because of the ambiguous concepts when taking mathematics non-rigorously, like saying infinity/infinity then doing L'hopital's rule and people wondering how the hell does an infinity over an infinity equal to 0 for example. That's first. Second, there's a certain ability to analyze concepts and some problem-solving skills which many people lack, which makes math less understandable. There is no pulling theorems out of thin air to be justified later. In modern mathematics, it seems to me that stuff are justified pretty well. The only thing that you might have the right to object about is axiom systems, which as I see, are pretty important. Yes, many axioms are self-evident, and in times where they are not, it is very alright as we are building a certain system, defining it using axioms, and then deducing what properties will come out of such a system. Sorry if I understood you wrong.

[Anonymous No.6972320]

>>6972180
>>6972171
>>6972164
I like these posts

whenever you try to get familiar with a new topic in math, all it says is "you need to read my 574 last papers to understand the first 10 words"

[Anonymous No.6972325]

>>6972164
Can someone expand on this? Are situations like this anon has described common?

[Anonymous No.6972333]

>>6972317
>how the hell does an infinity over an infinity equal to 0
Lrn2limit-process

[Anonymous No.6972337]

>>6972317

All I'm saying is, set-theoretic framework for mathematics which academia has embraced with very little criticism needs to be overhauled.

[Anonymous No.6972342]

>>6972337
That is of course a personal opinion as well as an opinion held by several of my math professors, having a firm belief in hard science and rigor that's only obtained from experimentation.

[Anonymous No.6972343]

>>6972333
I didn't get what you just said. I understand stuff, but I'm talking for many of my classmates who don't.

>>6972337
I'm not an expert so I don't know. However, if you think that a framework needs to be overhauled, shouldn't you provide a better, more effective one that can still hold mathematics and its rigor?

[Anonymous No.6972355]

>>6972337
>Set theory was embraced with very little criticism.

HAHAHAHAHA! Holy fuck, set theory was massively controversial in its day, fuck even Poincare stood against it.

[Anonymous No.6972367]

>>6972343
>I didn't get what you just said
<div class="math"> \lim_{x \to \infty} \frac{x}{x} \to 1 </div> Which should be trivially obvious.

[Anonymous No.6972370]

>>6972343

Functional theory of mathematics paper I was reading seems to provide some logical groundwork which people can work from, building up elementary to abstract mathematics as functional properties (I think they called them functors or something). I was going to post the article here but I can't seem to find it again :/

>>6972355
well regardless it seems to be the religious approach used to educate people at the Univ. here in Texas.

[Anonymous No.6972375]

>>6972370
>well regardless it seems to be the religious approach used to educate people at the Univ. here in Texas.

So what you're saying is that you're main criticism has been shown to be completely false, but that doesn't matter because....reasons. You're a walking example of a person that can see past his own beliefs.

[Anonymous No.6972385]

>>6972129
>wolfram alpha
>good
>let alone great
>let alone the greatest
>implying writing books is hard
A 4 year old could almost publish books about the current state of quantum mechanics because writing books doesn't actually require understanding anything
>implying the people on the committee matter at all
>implying mathematica isn't shit
>implying knowledge-based programming is at all useful in any capacity
>implying a new kind of science isn't retarded
>implying cellular automata are a field of mathematics
>implying he's ulam
>implying he's von neuman

[Anonymous No.6972401]

>>6972307
>wildburgers
>ever
Of all the people you could have quoted, you chose someone who's provably wrong and also demented.

[Anonymous No.6972404]

>>6972385
Sweet salty tears. Yummy!

[Anonymous No.6972421]

>>6972404
Are you the Holy Projector?

[Anonymous No.6972432]

>>6972370
Wait...what are you complaining about? That we need less set theory...? Why?

[Anonymous No.6972489]

>>6972129
>has a periodic element named after him

Please tell me you don't mean Tungsten aka Wolfram.

[Anonymous No.6972505]

>>6972489
Hahah holy shit if this

[Anonymous No.6972513]

>>6972432

Set Theory is logically inconsistent even at it's most basic/elementary levels.

[Anonymous No.6972527]

>>6972180
Underrated post.

[Anonymous No.6972533]

>>6972129
all true up until that last thing, which i assume was that bullshit piece of shit that was discarded by 99% of the scientific community

unfortunately this is as it always goes with geniuses though.

eventually though, one of these people will come up with the latest innovation which turns out to be true, and they'll become the next in the list of revolutionaries alongside: galileo/newton/maxwell/einstein.

this time however, it's not going to be Wolfram

[Anonymous No.6972659]

>>6972533
>totally_not_op.jpg

[Anonymous No.6972669]

>>6972513
Prove it.
Hard mode:
>No Russell's paradox or anything else that hasn't already been stated almost a century prior
Harder mode:
>Use the ZFC axioms.

[Anonymous No.6972675]

>>6972513
>muh godel's incompleteness

[Anonymous No.6972680]

>>6972129
And yet he's still a fucking jew who can't make step-by-step solution available unless you pay 5€ a month.

He's a genius and that's great. But I still can't admire someone who tries to make money out of everything. They could use Javascript to distribute the workload among the users and alleviate the cloud computing costs. I'm sure enough people buy Mathematica already.

Many great ideas get ruined by greed, Facebook is a prime example of this. While enjoying luxery is a good thing, there is no way a single person can "consume" billions of dollars. Forbes 500 is a dick waving contest. Don't forget your humanity people.

[Anonymous No.6972686]

>>6972680
Cheaper than what I would charge lazy fuckers for step by step solutions.
A man's gotta eat.

[Anonymous No.6972693]

>>6972686
>Cheaper than what I would charge lazy fuckers for step by step solutions.

I'm not talking about calc1 & 2, kid.

[Anonymous No.6972700]

>>6972693
The sentiment applies to the whole of the undergraduate math body.
Do your fucking homework.

[Anonymous No.6972769]

People do not like him because he did something rare for a math dork; created a very successful software company. Most math guys are in academia or code monkey jobs. Other talk he did; talkers are no good doers (from Richard III). I went tom his talk at UCSD and he is very nerdy and unsettled in person. He is not like Gates or Jobs when it comes to speaking. Schools make you pay to do online homework and WA made doing the stuff super easy.

[Anonymous No.6972773]

>>6972769
>People do not like him because he did something rare for a math dork

No people don't like him because he's a self-righteous, arrogant cunt. Whether or not history will vindicate him (I doubt it will) is irrelevant to why people don't like him in the here and now.

[Anonymous No.6972836]

>>6972163
Damn, he really got told.

[Anonymous No.6972864]

>>6972513
ZFC isn't inconsistent the last I checked.

[Anonymous No.6973039]

>>6972163
Feynman, original gangsta alpha as fuq

[Anonymous No.6973149]

>>6972370
You're talking about category theory, which has been gaining solid ground for decades.

But it's weird that you have qualms about this category/set quarrell (so to speak), because to most mathematicians, it absolutely doesn't matter. You can do functional analysis without dwelling into the most problematic aspects of set theory, simply using it as a handful of language habits that facilitate proofs. It doesn't matter all that much at least up until gradschool, and even then it might not being that important depending on your field.

Ultimately it's the same thing for every field, part of being skilled is getting used to how your colleagues do their job, and engineering and physics certainly have no shortage of shaky grounds. So the problem you're complaining about, at least in the form you're currently complaining about it, sound like a pseudo-problem to me.

In particular I find very odd that you blame the shortfalls of string theory on this, as if physicists cared about the foundational ground of math, and as if a physics theory could only fail because of the maths.

tl;dr: There seems to be much confusion in your head. Listen less to Wildberger, who has yet to prove his approach is a good replacement for the current way of doing stuff, and spend more time visualizing things.

>>6972513
If you have a proof of that you might want to send it to the Fields Medal committee.

[Anonymous No.6973203]

>>6972370
exemplar Wildburger
>doesn't know about the history of set-theory and thus the reasons why it be as it is
>thinks only books he understands are meaningful
>doesn't know shit about category theory
>still thinks he can judge the foundations of modern mathematics
stay delusional kid

[Anonymous No.6973250]

>>6972180
>>6972320
>>6972527


Good luck becoming a successful scientist without learning what those before you have already established.
Because Maxxwell never bothered with Newton.
Einstein never cared to learn Riemann.
Oh wait, yes they did.

You idiots spout your nonsense because you don't like having to sit down and learn things. Instead, you like to be given a blank piece of paper, and a chance to think "creatively", reassuring yourself that if you ccan just think creatively enough, you will reinvent absolutely everything that other people have already painstakingly achieved before you - you will stumble upon the complexities of modern science all by yourself.

Stop dreaming. You are not Ramanujan, and neither are 99.9999% of other people on Earth. If you want to do science, you have to shut up and study what science there already is.

[Anonymous No.6973255]

>>6972221
He has probably read a social criticism book written by a lefty, so he thinks that learning 2+2=4 isn't a helpful step on your way to academic success, but instead ruthless indoctrincation that kills creativity.

[Anonymous No.6973259]

>>6972180
someone is scared of progress

[Anonymous No.6973263]

>>6972180
[tinfoil hat intensifies]

[Anonymous No.6973678]

>>6972343
>but I'm talking for many of my classmates who don't.
you mean like this?
>>6972367

[Anonymous No.6973720]

>>6973250
This this this this this this this this this

Of the extremely limited subset of scientists with the capacity to intuit and solve paradigm-shattering problems in a given field, I guarantee most of them are intimately familiar with the past literature. You don't identify good research problems in vacuum: you identify them by exploring all the progress known to date and filling in the most salient gaps.

[Anonymous No.6975198]

>>6972129
So his accomplishment is creating a commercial product and starting college at 15?
Cool.
Now his contribution?

[Anonymous No.6975208]

>>6973250
This reminds me of a goofy quote I found on the interbutts once, on a software engineer's blog.

Went something like:

"Scientists stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them.

Engineers tend to stand on the toes of their peers"

[Anonymous No.6975263]

>>6972337
>>6972370
>>6972513
stop posting

[Anonymous No.6975266]

>>6972669
if he is to prove set theory is inconsistent, he has to use ZFC (and first order language) , because that IS set theory

and Russel's paradox is a non issue in ZFC because you simply can't from the set of all sets.

also other classical paradoxes are eliminated in ZFC (for example classical greek ones like "the biggest number you can say in english in 1000 characters" stuff is eliminated with the axioms of first order language )

[Anonymous No.6975267]

>>6975198

do you even know wolfram alpha/mathematica? this IS his contribution. besides he's active in research

[Anonymous No.6975431]

>>6975267
So, he contributed literally nothing but he's trying so that excuses him? Whatever.

[Anonymous No.6975439]

>>6972129

Stuff he has done sure is cool, but tungsten was actually found in 18th century by a swede.

[Anonymous No.6975441]

>>6975431
What? Mathematica and Alpha are softwares widely used by scientists. Sure is a great contribution.

[Anonymous No.6975452]

>>6975441
>Implying anyone does serious research with Alpha

Does anyone actually use Mathematica, aren't there better open source alternatives?

[Anonymous No.6975466]

>>6975452
mathematica has very powerful built-in functions that make 'drafting' ideas very easy. In high-energy-physics I know some Phds that sketch their ideas in Mathematica and test them and if it works alright they replicate it with fortran (if there's much legacy code to work with) or C/Matlab/whatever is fastest.

In Astrophysics Mathematica is used to solve symbolic equations (I've seen examples in General relativity) and also to get a feel for certain simulations which later might be implemented using other languages as above. It's used quite a lot really but not for big number crunching, at least in my experience.

[Anonymous No.6975481]

>>6975452
I know academics in physics who use Mathematica for low key computations.
I also know several firms who don't use it just because the license is freaking expensive.

[Anonymous No.6975487]

i think wolfram is a dick for creating this awesome software and charging exorbitant prices for it therefore making everyone not use it.

[Anonymous No.6975503]

>>6973250
Even Ramanujan was familiar with a fair amount of the literature of his time. And of the subjects he didn't read about, he made some pretty badly false assumptions (e.g. his attempts at bounding the prime counting function and similar quantities).

[Anonymous No.6975548]

>>6975487
It's a dilemma. People need to find a way to make money, but the current ways to do that with Intellectual Properties are really not satisfactory.

Patents can have the same effect - i.e. scaring away people from using a technology and using something else ( usually less good ) instead. I didn't bother to learn arithmetic coding well until the patents expired. By then many coding standards had used other suckier patent-free compression methods. Just to avoid the licence costs / potential law suits.

[Anonymous No.6975680]

>is ugly as fuck
Life is truly suffering. I respect this guy, but your average person wont even be able to grasp his intellect, women wont give him any attention etc
Its sad but also good cos Im not nearly as smart as him but can still be very successful and respected because I'm above average intelligence and attractive, however inside me I feel the system I am playing is very cheap.

[Anonymous No.6975808]

>>6972129
>Has an element named after him
Maximum KEK
Also, is Stephen Wolfram the new meme scientist?

[Anonymous No.6975819]

he should become a sperm donor

[Anonymous No.6975868]

>>6975819
>>6975680

Nah. He should just kill himself. Otherwise those kids will probably grow up and be just like him. We can't have that, can we?

[Anonymous No.6975910]

>>6975466
Anyone with half a brain would rather use matlab.

[Anonymous No.6975914]

>>6975819
I would purchase his sperm and drink it to obtain his superpowers.

[Anonymous No.6975931]

Stephen go away

[Anonymous No.6976023]

>>6975910
Matlab can do some symbolics, but not as cool stuff as Mathematica. Mathematica also better at extremely high precision arithmetics (I've been told). For simulations and data processing I think Matlab is better.

It's said that the average human brain only uses 10% of all "resources". Maybe some parts of the brain even reduce "performance"? It is obvious to psychologists that can be the case. Irrational fears and anxiety and various emotions can sure cripple or dull the sharpest minds.

But when someone shows signs of such lack of disabling function we immediately start looking for a diagnosis as if it wasn't a feature. Could it be autism, some other disorder or maybe even sociopathy?

Why this strong need to manipulate people and anyone not manipulable is labelled "broken"?

[Anonymous No.6976176]

>>6976023
>I am a retarded popsci inbred therefore everything I say is right and I'm a science god!

[Anonymous No.6976183]

If he's so smart why can't he cure baldness?

[Anonymous No.6976488]

>>6975910
apples and pears. they are not in direct competition. maple is mathematica's rival

[Anonymous No.6976497]

>>6976488
Maple is mathematica's rival in the same sense that painting is a rival to math, unlike mathematica v.s. matlab which is basically mac v.s. PC.

[Anonymous No.6976508]

>>6976497
>mathematica v.s. matlab which is basically mac v.s. PC.

Not really. Matlab is geared toward numerics, Mathematica is geared for symbolic computation.

[Anonymous No.6976513]

>>6972489
>>6975808

This. Holy shit, the element is named after the first ore it was extracted from, Wolframite. The etymology predates Stephen Wolfram.

>le new meme

[Anonymous No.6976519]

>>6976497
Nice community college writing skills. That whole post makes no sense.

[Anonymous No.6976573]

>>6976519
Have you tried getting a brain? It might help.

[Anonymous No.6977100]

>>6972265
>Ockham's razor states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected
too fucking bad we don't have multiple competing hypotheses that yield valid results for quantum shit, do we?
also, why are 1000 layers of abstraction too much? you are basing your whole argument around the fact that you perceive it to be too much, which is perfectly fucking arbitrary.

[Anonymous No.6977106]

>>6972281
why is wolframalpha a search engine?

[Anonymous No.6977151]

>>6972163
Feynman/10