- >> “You keep holding on to hope, then breaking it, and moving forward by picking up ideas from the ashes,” [Baek] said in an interview with a web magazine published by Korean Institute for Advanced Study.
“I’m closer to a daydreamer by nature, and for me mathematical research is a repetition of dreaming and waking up.”
beautiful!
by cousin_it
4 subcomments
- I love the kind of science reporting on display in this article! It stays at a consistent, objective level of detail throughout (no "imagine a vector space as a block of jello" or whatever it is that Quanta and other publications are always doing). It allows specialists to understand exactly what's being claimed, and at the same time stays accessible to laypeople. It feels like it's written for the kind of reader that I aspire to be: not necessarily a specialist on every topic under the sun, but someone who has finished high school and is paying attention.
Though I guess writing like this doesn't pay off in the modern world. Most readers don't consistently pay attention when reading, and to be honest, I don't either.
- (2024) Source is Scientific-American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-so... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42946052)
Discussion on the paper (131 points, 2024, 36 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42300382
- Dan Romik has a nice intro on the moving sofa problem: https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~romik/movingsofa/
by OsrsNeedsf2P
2 subcomments
- Actual paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19826
by throwawayk7h
1 subcomments
- This is the famous sofa problem! It's hard to believe it's finally solved; I've spent many evenings staring at the wikipedia article wondering at how even what seem to be the simplest of problems defy the reach of mathematics.
by turbonaut
1 subcomments
- Ironic. In Korea sofas would often bypass the corridor by way of a ladder lift (which can be scarily high).
https://centers.ibs.re.kr/html/living_en/housing/moving2.htm...
by dirkgwntly
1 subcomments
- > The so-called moving sofa problem asks how large a rigid shape can be while still being able to pass around a right-angled corner in an L-shaped corridor of a constant width of 1 meter.
This was also the problem in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, so fictionally this problem had already been solved.
- Looking at that graphic... it almost seems obvious. The outer corner radius would be relative to the inner curve radius in some fixed relationship, wouldn't it? The shallower the inner curve, the larger the outer curve has to be. A completely convex outside could have a flat inside. An inside that was concave from end to end could have a flat outside. Kudos to the guy for writing a proof! I wish this article explained better why it took 60 years to solve this...
- This won't be popular [1], but research breakthroughs in theoretical mathematics seem to be often useless in a way that useless science is not. Scientific breakthroughs are also often useless (nothing practical is gained from the first detection of a gravitational wave, or from finding out how flight first evolved in insects) but scientific insights still have more information content: they tell us facts specifically about our world, while mathematical proofs merely tell us about all possible worlds. About some consequence of made-up assumptions we happen to find interesting.
It's a bit like finding the fastest way possible to beat Super Mario Bros 3 while collecting the minimum number of coins. A solution to a neat puzzle, but it doesn't carry the epistemic weight of finding out how the universe works, even if both pieces of knowledge are equally useless.
1: And of course this point doesn't apply to applied math.
- Is the equivalent problem in 3D harder or easier? Seems like it would be harder but you never know with these things.
- *PIVOT!*
- Now I want a sofa of that shape to go with my ein-stein tiled floor and decorative Knuth’s dragon. I’ll add some nice art in a shape that can’t pass through itself as well.
by brewcejener
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- Looks like a couch, should have just given the prize too a furniture mover. /s
by llmslave2
4 subcomments
- [flagged]
by calvinmorrison
0 subcomment
- This is why i keep whittling at the squaring a circle ;)
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