14 pointsby Tomte2 hours ago2 comments
  • noriran hour ago
    Terry Tao is a next level vibe coder: he inspires people to do his vibe coding for him. As someone with a background in advanced math, though never even close to Tao's level, I find myself skeptical about this type of mathematics. I don't personally find it beautiful and it feels like the line between the profound and the trivial (as in of minimal importance not difficulty) is blurry. One could argue for pure mathematics that is of no practical utility but is aesthetically beautiful, but I struggle to see the beauty in a gargantuan lean proof constructed by 100 different people. Perhaps this work will lead to deeper insight about the universe and the human condition, but I catch a whiff of problem solving for the sake of problem solving untethered from a deeper sense of purpose and meaning.
    • throwaway67678an hour ago
      Arguments about beauty don't lead anywhere constructive because they are too observer- and context-dependent. Poincaré himself was decrying continuous non-differentiable functions as abominations. The monster group is, well, just like that. What feels intellectually ugly for one generation is natural for the next, and the field moves on
      • Ygg2an hour ago
        According to legends Pythagoreans tried to surpress existence of irrational numbers because they couldn't be expressed as ratio of natural numbers

        Supposedly even drowned their member that divulged their existence.

    • zem6 minutes ago
      the analogy with experimental physics is a good one - being sure something is true is a good first step to developing an elegant proof of its truth.
  • nylonstrung36 minutes ago
    More accurate title would be "Terry Tao Became an Evangelist for Lean"