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Comment by johngossman

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.

parent johngossman 11 months ago

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