<< "Representation theory is a way of taking [simple] objects and “representing” them with [more complex] objects." >> Or as Goethe is alleged to have observed "Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different." Quoted at https://www.math.utah.edu/~cherk/mathjokes.html WFL On 6/12/20, Brad Klee <bradklee@gmail.com> wrote:
The issue is not about you or I. It is about citizen scientists, and whether or not they are being served good information.
As someone who has spent a fair amount of time, in class and after, studying rep. theory, I do not feel like the public is well served by this article. Likely they will walk away with misconceptions and wrong ideas.
Harter spent his whole career making fun problems about symmetric oscillators, and Quanta doesn’t know and doesn’t care.
Instead of a low-value quanta article it is possible to just send an email saying, “Hey, check out this playlist on YouTube”:
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsaDbvh6KgCqWjuXArHDZqi5RhtkzWer7
Many people will learn from it!
Cheers,
—Brad
On Jun 11, 2020, at 7:17 PM, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
I agree that it's not a good article. I'd say very few Quanta articles on math seem good to me — they're so dumbed down that they convey very little information.
But for that reason I'd never look to a Quanta article to learn much about a field of math.
—Dan
----- If you are trying to learn representation theory, the Quanta article looks to be useless, especially because it only references other Quanta articles (probably with similar problems). -----
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