Comment by johngossman

Comment by johngossman 2 hours ago

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Mathematics is such an old field, older than anything except arguably philosophy, that it's too broad and deep for anyone to really understand everything. Even in graduate school I often took classes in things discovered by Gauss or Euler centuries before. A lot of the mathematical topics the HN crowd seems to like--things like the Collatz conjecture or Busy Beavers--are 60, 80 years old. So, you end up having to spend years specializing and then struggle to find other with the same background.

All of which is compounded by the desire to provide minimal "proofs from the book" and leave out the intuitions behind them.

ekjhgkejhgk an hour ago

> A lot of the mathematical topics the HN crowd seems to like--things like the Collatz conjecture or Busy Beavers--are 60, 80 years old.

Do you know the reason for that? The reason is that those problems are open and easy to understand. For the rest of open problems, you need an expert to even understand the problem statement.

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Davidzheng an hour ago

actually a lot of minimal proof expose more intuition than older proofs people find at first. I find it usually not extremely enlightening reading the first proofs of results, counterintuitively.

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bell-cot 32 minutes ago

I'll argue for astronomy being the oldest. Minimal knowledge would help pre-humans navigate and keep track of the seasons. Birds are known to navigate by the stars.

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  • nkrisc a minute ago

    I would argue that some form of mathematics is necessary for astronomy, for “astronomy” as defined as anything more than simply recognizing and following stars.

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scotty79 an hour ago

> Mathematics is such an old field, older than anything except arguably philosophy

If we are already venturing outside of scientific realm with philosophy, I'm sure fields of literature or politics are older. Especially since philosophy is just a subset of literature.

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  • saithound an hour ago

    > I'm sure fields of literature or politics are older.

    As far as anybody can tell, mathematics is way older than literature.

    The oldest known proper accounting tokens are from 7000ish BCE, and show proper understanding of addition and multiplication.

    The people who made the Ishango bone 25k years ago were probably aware of at least rudimentary addition.

    The earliest writings are from the 3000s BCE, and are purely administrative. Literature, by definition, appeared later than writing.

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    • thaumasiotes an hour ago

      > As far as anybody can tell, mathematics is way older than literature.

      That depends what you mean by "literature". If you want it to be written down, then it's very recent because writing is very recent.

      But it would be normal to consider cultural products to be literature regardless of whether they're written down. Writing is a medium of transmission. You wouldn't study the epic of Gilgamesh because it's written down. You study it to see what the Sumerians thought about the topics it covers, or to see which god some iconography that you found represents, or... anything that it might plausibly tell you. But the fact that it was written down is only the reason you can study it, not the reason you want to.

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