@shanecelis@mastodon.gamedev.place
2026-07-15 17:38 UTC
Replies (3)
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@joelvanderwerf@mastodon.social 2026-07-15 17:47
@shanecelis@mastodon.gamedev.place @RickiTarr@beige.party A variation on that story from Richard Feyman's autobiography:
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@vincent@merveilles.town 2026-07-15 18:42
@shanecelis@mastodon.gamedev.place @RickiTarr@beige.party When I was a student I did an independent study with an expert in complex analysis. We would meet in his office and review the material and I would frequently ask him a question and he would think for 3-5 minutes before answering. Very challenging.
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@vincent@merveilles.town 2026-07-15 18:47
@shanecelis@mastodon.gamedev.place @RickiTarr@beige.party There is actually something somewhat deep here. This joke is about the fact that mathematicians can believe something is "obvious" even if the route to getting there is complex or circuitous. Why this is the case is pretty deep. In principal, when we do math, we perform a series of manipulations on sentences in a formal system with the rules of the system and thus nothing we discover is genuinely novel - all mathematical proofs are already latent in the system. Yet we find some proofs non-obvious, others obvious, some proofs feel like "coincidences" and others do not. Consider this paper by Lange: "What are Mathematical Coincidences and Why do they Matter?" http://marclange.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/mathcoincMINDpublished.pdf