alt Hacker NewsTerry Tao is a next level vibe coder: he inspires people to do his vibe coding for him. As someone with a background in advanced math, though never even close to Tao's level, I find myself skeptical about this type of mathematics. I don't personally find it beautiful and it feels like the line between the profound and the trivial (as in of minimal importance not difficulty) is blurry. One could argue for pure mathematics that is of no practical utility but is aesthetically beautiful, but I struggle to see the beauty in a gargantuan lean proof constructed by 100 different people. Perhaps this work will lead to deeper insight about the universe and the human condition, but I catch a whiff of problem solving for the sake of problem solving untethered from a deeper sense of purpose and meaning.
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Arguments about beauty don't lead anywhere constructive because they are too observer- and context-dependent. Poincaré himself was decrying continuous non-differentiable functions as abominations. The monster group is, well, just like that. What feels intellectually ugly for one generation is natural for the next, and the field moves on
> One could argue for pure mathematics that is of no practical utility
wait what is the math with no utility
the analogy with experimental physics is a good one - being sure something is true is a good first step to developing an elegant proof of its truth.
I think what people find beautiful in math is largely something that enables the mathematics (or physics) to be translated to something that they can think about intuitively, and what people can handle in an intuitive way is largely an artifact of what the brain evolved to be able to think about "naturally". But it's quite possible that most things that are true about the universe or math are just ugly and unintuitive, and the pursuit of truth shouldn't necessarily be limited by what people can easily reason about and hold in their heads.
Beautiful explanations are lovely when they exist, but we shouldn't wait for them if we can also find the truth through an ugly method.
> I struggle to see the beauty in a gargantuan lean proof constructed by 100 different people
Why does it need to be beautiful? Once you proved it it's true and you can use its consequences in math, sciences and engineerings.