Terence Tao on Nostr: Akshay Venktesh gave a thoughtful and accessible talk recently entitled ...
Akshay Venktesh gave a thoughtful and accessible talk recently entitled "(Re)imagining mathematics in a world of reasoning machines". I particularly liked his highlighting of Davis and Hersh's pithy definition of mathematics (which I had not been previously aware of) as "the study of mental objects with reproducible properties"; it is a nice way to abstract out the most essential features of the diverse universe of mathematical objects (numbers, shapes, functions, etc.) that mathematicians actually study. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYCT7cw0ycw
(My own personal definition of mathematics is more descriptive than prescriptive: mathematics is what mathematicians do, and mathematicians are the people who study mathmatics. This sounds like a tautologically circular definition, but I think of it more as describing the equations of motion of a stochastic dynamical system, in which breakthroughs in mathematics attract more attention by mathematicians, which in turn redefines the relative weighting of different fields of mathematics.)
(My own personal definition of mathematics is more descriptive than prescriptive: mathematics is what mathematicians do, and mathematicians are the people who study mathmatics. This sounds like a tautologically circular definition, but I think of it more as describing the equations of motion of a stochastic dynamical system, in which breakthroughs in mathematics attract more attention by mathematicians, which in turn redefines the relative weighting of different fields of mathematics.)