[seqfan] Re: FYI - Terence Tao's remark, mentioning OEIS

[Frederick Schneider]

Thanks for the pointer to his blog, Jonathan.

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Jonathan Post <jvospost3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Terry Tao has a very fine thread on Collaboration in his blog.
> Coincidently, I just quoted him on the n-Category Cafe blog on the
> recurring seqfans topic of  open source mathematics and what makes a
> sequence beautiful:
>
> ==============
> <a href="
> http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2009/02/last_person_standing.html
> ">Last
> Person Standing
> Posted by David Corfield</a>
>
> Tim Gowers is engaged in a new venture in open source mathematics. As
> one might expect from a leading representative of the
> 'problem-solving' culture, Gowers has proposed a blog-based group
> problem solving challenge.
>
> He motivates his choice of problem thus:
>
>    Does the problem split naturally into subtasks? That is, is it
> parallelizable? I'm actually not completely sure that that's what I'm
> aiming for. A massively parallelizable project would be something more
> like the classification of finite simple groups, where one or two
> people directed the project and parcelled out lots of different tasks
> to lots of different people, who go off and work individually. But I'm
> interested in the question of whether it is possible for lots of
> people to solve one single problem rather than lots of people to solve
> one problem each. [truncated]
>
> ==============
>
> Tao on Lax as Miraculous; Re: Last Person Standing
>
> In Bulletin of the AMS, Vol.46, No.1, Jan 2009, p.10, of Terry Taos's
> wonderful survey "Why Are Solitons Stable?" he says of the inverse
> scattering approach:
>
> "This is a vast subject that can be viewed from many different
> algebraic and geometric perspectives; we shall content ourselves with
> describing the approach based on Lax pairs, which has the advantage of
> simplicity, provided that one is willing to accept a rather miraculous
> algebraic identity…."
>
> So, beauty from something that looks at first like a weird
> coincidence, which on further analysis is so deep that it appears a
> miracle, even to a genius such as Tao!
>
> Surely this matters very much, both in the Physics and the Mathematics
> perpectives.
>
> On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Alexander Povolotsky
> <apovolot at gmail.com> wrote:
> > FYI - Terence Tao's remark, mentioning OEIS (I made it bold)
> >
> >  ARP
> > =========================================================================
> >
> http://gowers.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/is-massively-collaborative-mathematics-possible/
> >  February 1, 2009 at 8:27 pm
> > I can't speak for others, but as for my own research, at least half of my
> > papers are joint with one or more authors, and amongst those papers that
> I
> > consider among my best work, they are virtually all joint.
> >  Of course, each mathematician has his or her own unique research style,
> and
> > this diversity is a very healthy thing for mathematics as a whole. But I
> > think 21st century mathematics differs from 19th and early 20th century
> > mathematics in at least two important respects. Firstly, the advent of
> > modern communication technologies, most notably the internet, has made it
> > significantly easier to collaborate with other mathematicians who are not
> at
> > the same physical location. (Most of my collaborations, for instance,
> would
> > be non-existent, or at least significantly less productive, without the
> > internet.) One can imagine the next generation of technologies having an
> > even stronger impact in this direction (with this project possibly being
> an
> > example; other extant examples include Wikipedia and the *Online
> > Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences*).
> > ...
> > =====================================================================
> >
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> >
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