Настроение:

bouncy

перечитывая классиков
неожиданная кульминация длинного (и местами занудного)
разговора известного пользователя sowa с Тао, Гауэрсом и
проходившими мимо математиками, про, без сомнения, очень важные
материи, сюрреалистичная в своей непосредственности, и потому
мне показавшаяся очень весёлой.

sowa Says:
March 26, 2013 at 1:48 pm

To Emmanuel Kowalski:

This looks very convincing for some, probably. But before your comment
all tried use really significant and already known to relatively wide
audience results. Now you pick up two highly specialized short notes
which mention that some combinatorial theorems are used. The abstracts
look like their authors (most of whom are known to me as
mathematicians) met at some conference and proved a couple of liitle
results during a break.

Emmanuel Kowalski Says:

March 26, 2013 at 5:57 pm

I don’t particularly believe in two cultures either (except maybe
open-mindedness versus closed-mindedness, which seems to me to be a
psychological reality), but since there was a claim of applications
going in one direction, why shouldn’t examples in the opposite
direction be relevant?

(Note: I have no idea what “before your comment all tried use really
significant and already known to relatively wide audience results”
could possibly mean).

Matthew Emerton Says:
March 26, 2013 at 8:06 pm

Dear Emmanuel,

I think “before your comment all tried use really significant and
already known to relatively wide audience results” means “before you
made your comment, every one [making the argument that there are
applications in the other direction, i.e. from the second culture to
the first culture] tried using as examples results that are really
significant and known to a relatively wide audience”. I don’t know any
Russian grammar, unfortunately, but this reminds me of constructions
in German where what would be a separate phrase in English becomes
instead an extended adjective that is directly applied to the noun.

Regards,

Matthew


sowa Says:
March 27, 2013 at 12:36 am

Wow!

To Matthew Emerton:

That is a fantastic insight! You are almost right on the target. This
elevates the discussion to a new level rarely seen on the web.

But the lack of knowledge of Russian grammar apparently misleads you a
little. I happen to know the Russian grammar a little and somewhat
better the German one. When I write in any language, I indeed tend to
write in way which is more natural for the German language. When I
write in English, I often have to go over the text and to break
complicated German-like phrases into several more suitable for
English. This writing style is more or less grammatically correct in
Russian (except some difficult German constructions having no
equivalents in both Russian and English). But it is fairly alien to
the Russian language. Apparently, if I would write the same things in
Russian, the result will look as a translation from German.

It seems that when I write in English, it also looks like a
translation from German.

This has nothing to do with my language skills or lack of them. When I
write in English, I think in English. What you see here is not a
translation from any other language. (I just split a phrase into
two!).

The reason is quite relevant for mathematics. I do not think linearly
no matter what I am thinking about, a theorem, a TV show, or what I
would like to do during the Spring break. Some people claim that they
think in words and hence almost inevitably they think
linearly. Perhaps, this style, if it really exists, is suitable for
working in the mathematical logic.

But mathematics is not a linear subject. A more adequate model would
be not a sequence of statements, but a graph which is even not a tree
(combinatorics!). Still, oriented cycles are not allowed.