jgill

Indeed it is. Somewhere on the downhill spectrum between love of wisdom and love of money. I fear I just enjoyed math and the lifestyle provided by ac...

Very nicely put, and thought-provoking.

Is that what's happened here? Am I arguing from a "higher moral ground"? Thanks for telling me. I only taught math (and was a college administrator fo...

With me, it would reveal the difficulty pulling words from my memory at my age. :worry:

Most of us don't either.

I was a gymnast eons ago and agree with you somewhat. It used to be 0-10, and now its 0-?. The judges are usually skilled enough and the routines do h...

For many if not most of us its not a photographic process. I was a rock climber for many years and frequently had the following experience: I would wo...

Originally perhaps. Not so much these days. Abstractions and generalizations abound. After many years I have concluded that math is both created and d...

It's a Lagrangian description of quantum activity I suppose. Ask a physicist (if they haven't all left TPF)

Some Heavy Math, Dude!

I've actually never known a fellow math PhD who pranced or insisted on the Dr. title. My students called me by my first name or Mr. Gill or professor....

An admirable skill for a modern PhD, but has little to do with the degree. As a mathematician I taught the subject in a way I hoped would spark an ong...

It appears you've never lost yours. Congratulations.

Really? Just your opinion?

Let's see, about 140 articles on mathematics research sent to ArXiv.org daily. The lack of imagination is astounding.

Light speed being invariant under motion. Quantum effects. Etc.

You've gone down the path of algorithmic theory again, which has little to do with a typical mathematical proof. Not my bailiwick.

New to me. Provide a link or two.

A mathematician might say, "That proof was quite complex". Another might add, "Yes, but elementary!" Both could be correct. Complexity of proof is a k...

If there is conflict between academia and the non-academic world, there is assuredly meritocracy in the former within disciplines, leading to personal...

Long before that defense pundits and military planners carefully manipulated news media to support the war effort. And perhaps not everyone read a new...

In a larger sense, is a meritocracy unfair?

Is There a State Crises in Sweden? Food for thought. Balancing a welcome carpet for immigrants with social welfare movements. Law and order issues. An...

In a sense calculus has an "idealized" structure and physics cannot do without it, but you must be referring to set theory and foundations, and the ax...

:up: I can add little to nothing. You have expressed your point of view - to which I agree - admirably.

Assuming work is required for most - yes, a dreadful indignity of the human spirit - should a country, say the USA, make a top priority a minimum wage...

Why stop at open borders? If someone lives in the US, shouldn't they be allowed to vote - especially since they pay taxes? I bring this up as devil's ...

Scientific speculation is when two physicists discuss entanglement. This becomes philosophy when one of them mentions Kant.

Amazing. If mathematical life were only so simple. :roll:

As I might practice it, it's speculation. However, the literature shows that is a specific formal philosophical pursuit.

Philosophers love using words, the arrows in their quivers. And some, perhaps most, enjoy reading lengthy treatises. As an olde math person I admire b...

Fat fingers is a drawback. I try to avoid apps, but it keeps wanting them. Very demanding. :angry:

I think both special and general include observers. That's not the usual distinction. Accelerated motion and other features are considered in general.

Well, as an elder - perhaps the elder at age 84 - on this forum, I'll make a few comments. But first, anyone older than me please speak up.

Evraz steel mill in southern Colorado is constructing a massive array of solar panels to be the first steel mill in North America to incorporate solar...

I wonder how the proposed desalinization plants for coastal California will be powered?

I know it's trite, but imagine a maleable plastic doughnut being continuously deformed into a coffee cup. The notion of continuous transformations fro...

Qualitative does not imply nonmathematical. For example, it used to be said that topology is math without numbers, although that's not entirely true.

Good point.

I had not thought of monads apart from Leibniz's mathematical contributions. I now see that there is much more to the monad than I knew. Thanks for br...

From lecture notes by Sourav Chatterjee, Stanford:

Losing yourself in a flow state doesn't mean shifting to another "self". It means becoming part of the process without one's ego. That's a problem wit...

The second paragraph here is a good description: Generalized functions. I've never worked with these things. Continuous linear functionals are called ...

The flow state was popularized by an old acquaintance of mine, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In the sport of rock climbing it can be a delightful experienc...

Entanglement frequently arises in these discussions, and it's tempting to wander into quantum mysticism. Here is a fairly clear-eyed perspective of it...

Vector space does not mean vectors in space.

This is a relatively simple vector field in the complex plane based upon the function f(z)=-cos(z). The contour is a streamline describing the path of...

Too much overlap. But false info can lead to false knowledge and then to false wisdom.

This is a strange statement.

The first step is to visualize a vector field: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Contours_in_the_vector_field_f%28z%29_%3D_-Cos%28z%...