mikeiavelli
Joined 3 years ago
Joined 3 years ago
But yes, using the Laplacian seems natural as a metric for what he wants to measure. Coming from a physics background though, it felt weird being explained in terms of pixels in a picture what a laplacian is...
"The celebrated Pólya’s conjecture (1954) in spectral geometry states that the eigenvalue counting functions of the Dirichlet and Neumann Laplacian on a bounded Euclidean domain can be estimated from above and below, respectively, by the leading term of Weyl’s asymptotics. Pólya’s conjecture is known to be true for domains which tile Euclidean space, and, in addition, for some special domains in higher dimensions. In this paper, we prove Pólya’s conjecture for the disk, making it the first non-tiling planar domain for which the conjecture is verified. We also confirm Pólya’s conjecture for arbitrary planar sectors, and, in the Dirichlet case, for balls of any dimension. Along the way, we develop the known links between the spectral problems in the disk and certain lattice counting problems. A key novel ingredient is the observation, made in recent work of the last named author, that the corresponding eigenvalue and lattice counting functions are related not only asymptotically, but in fact satisfy certain uniform bounds."
While Maxwell’s work was inspired by Faraday's, it was also built upon the contributions of many other scientists (Coulomb, Ampère, Thomson, Neumann, Lenz, ...)
I disagree that his work offers profound new insights or that it has gone underappreciated.
Many mathematicians have explored the connections between computation, logic and formal systems for decades. I also take issue with the assertion that physicists have somehow "forgotten" or failed to appreciate these ideas within computer science. Many physicists are well versed in computational and information-theoretic concepts. The idea that simple rules can give rise to complex emergent behaviors is far from a new revelation.
Furthermore, Wolfram does not give due credit to this rich body of prior work. He presents his perspectives as groundbreaking discoveries, without properly acknowledging similar perspectives developed by others. This is not how science works.