i spent a little time thinking about math again because of the lovecraft thread and made a little progress articulating my criticism of what i saw in my time in grad school. basically i think pure math has become almost entirely highly technical bullshit
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not in the sense of indifferent to its truth value but in the sense of indifferent to its *significance*. almost nobody in pure math has a compelling vision of what kind of math would *matter* to do. if you read writing by mathematicians from 100+ years ago it's not like this
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Survival bias tho. Was all math 100 years ago so inspired, or is the inspired stuff what became canon and left a mark
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i mean yeah but it's just a desert out here, i should be able to find *somebody* if not everybody. there's been a real vibe shift imo although i never feel like i've pinned down what it is, still trying out articulations here
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one of the only modern mathematicians who i feel like had the spirit i'm trying to point at was bill thurston but he died in 2012 :/ gian-carlo rota also (spectacular writing) and he died in 1999
also Erdos. How about Knuth?
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