From the article: "Sure enough, the best invited talk was Michael
Kiessling's talk that used the ancient technology of overhead
projector, and it would have been even better if he only used the
blackboard, and it would have been better still if he didn't use
anything, just told us a story."
Exactly this. The fact that all of the mathematicians I've been around
to date (except for one, but he's a ham, so he doesn't really count in
this statistic since he already counts as a hacker :) have treated their
overall field more like a science than an art has really disenchanted me
from it. Yes, mathematics is regarded as the queen of all sciences, but
I don't really buy entirely into that. It has applications there, and
that's probably as far as it goes as far as science is concerned. (Disclaimer: I studied applied
mathematics at a small state university at the undergraduate level.)
Math is beautiful not because it is full of intricate logical machinery
and full of useful computational tools and full of pretty pictures;
rather, math is beautiful because the intricate logical machinery can
take different forms (how many different proofs of the FTIC are there?
Pythagoras' theorem?) and because it's an imaginary world inside one's
head where there are arbitrary -- even infinite -- dimensions and
fungible axioms.
The point of these meetings is to inform (and even pique the interest of) your colleagues. If they have
no idea what's going on and don't even understand the fundamental
notions, what's the point? You're wasting your time, keystrokes,
breath, and energy, not to mention the money provided to you by some
grants.
It would be nice if it were treated more as an art, but don't you think whoever is paying for the grants would rather the effort be put into digging deeper into specific research topics that may eventually be of use to science rather than finding beautiful proofs and relationships between things we already know to be true?
Exactly this. The fact that all of the mathematicians I've been around to date (except for one, but he's a ham, so he doesn't really count in this statistic since he already counts as a hacker :) have treated their overall field more like a science than an art has really disenchanted me from it. Yes, mathematics is regarded as the queen of all sciences, but I don't really buy entirely into that. It has applications there, and that's probably as far as it goes as far as science is concerned. (Disclaimer: I studied applied mathematics at a small state university at the undergraduate level.)
Math is beautiful not because it is full of intricate logical machinery and full of useful computational tools and full of pretty pictures; rather, math is beautiful because the intricate logical machinery can take different forms (how many different proofs of the FTIC are there? Pythagoras' theorem?) and because it's an imaginary world inside one's head where there are arbitrary -- even infinite -- dimensions and fungible axioms.
The point of these meetings is to inform (and even pique the interest of) your colleagues. If they have no idea what's going on and don't even understand the fundamental notions, what's the point? You're wasting your time, keystrokes, breath, and energy, not to mention the money provided to you by some grants.