Or, more likely, Satan has succeeded in impersonating God, so in fact, God's book really is Satan's beautiful book of the fruits of the tree of knowledge. I don't think it matters one way or the other. The problem in the essay is an interesting one, and good for you taking a pro-diversity stance. However, since you have lost time on a digression about popular television, I think you are missing an opportunity to talk about the dichotomy of originality and reproducibility. These days it seems that the best proof (or the best science), is whichever seems correct, yet is also the least reproducible. So much so that a fallacy has developed, where reproducibility and originality are mutually exclusive. "If a theorem (or an experiment) is reproducible, then it must have already been done, so it can not be original". This fallacy, I think, is a practical outgrowth of overpopulation relative to resources available, whereby some scientists have to be disrespected, when really they should not be. With big issues like cohomology or climate change, another obscure theorem from the crown of mathematics is not needed as much as we need a larger part of the population to understand basic facts that mathematicians and scientists aren't incentivized to prove again. So, in defence of reproducibility, I think scientists should be considered original when they develop new proofs of old truths, especially as part of an effort to include a wider population in the pursuit of science. (This would involve changing the schedule of who is to be disrespected.) After all, how can you call something "science", when only the smart half of the population claims it as intelligable? --Brad On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 10:12 PM James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm hoping to post the essay "What Proof is Best?" on my blog in a few days; comments are very welcome! The current draft is at
http://jamespropp.org/mathenchant/057-draft2.pdf
Thanks,
Jim _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun