A random tweet on here reminded of a wonderful old interview of László Lovász by Avi Wigderson https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2013/02/14/laszlo-lovasz/ … Of particular interest is his discussion of the hostility to combinatorics by "high brow"; "mainstream" (read closed minded) mathematicians of the time.
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This interview always fascinates me. It chalks up the development of an entire field, the ensuing sociology. What I also like in this is the role of people like Rota, who were "mainstream", but rather than be dismissive, had the approach to study it, make it "more legitimate".
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Of particular interest is a conference Mac Lane organized to basically show "graph theory was the slum of topology", inviting Erdős, Lovász, Szemeredi to provide even one result that was interesting. We need more Rotas in new fields, not the Mac Lanes.
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Replying to @_onionesque @isomorphisms
Dani Wise told our geometric topology class that the faculty who work in combinatorics could solve any of his research problems in a day and called them “real mathematicians”
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Replying to @fuiud @isomorphisms
DW was perhaps referring to the Rota/Stanley sort of combinatorics (I think the Hungarian style still has its dismissive critics). But the broader point is true. Atleast from what we get from the more classical people who double up as raconteurs:
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... At the core of many deep results is just some combinatorics.
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Item 8e on the last page of this tribute to Bob MacPherson http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~lji/macpherson-web.pdf … is relevant here.
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