I bookmarked a couple of months ago, and finally got around to reading, this article by ‘Quanta’ magazine on the story behind Freedman's proof of the 4-dimensional Poincaré conjecture — and how it was saved from being “lost”. It's quite interesting. quantamagazine.org/new-math-book-…
The statement is that any topological 4-manifold that is a homotopy sphere is, in fact, homeomorphic to a sphere. (The analogous theorem for dimension ≥5 was proved in the 1960's by Smale & others. In dimension 3 it was proved in the 2000's by Perelman.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generaliz…
The gist of the story in dimension 4 is that Michael Freedman wrote a sketch of a proof in the 1980's and convinced the experts that his proof held water, but details were never fully written down beyond this basic sketch (which further contained errors).
Now a team of people made an effort to fully understand the proof (with Freedman's help), fill in the gaps, and write it in the form of a book — so it can be understood by people who don't have access to the author, and so it won't be lost in time.
The ‘Quanta’ article does a decent job at explaining to the layperson what all this mean (the statement, and the very basic ideas of the proof). But perhaps more importantly, what this says about the social concept of what constitutes an accepted “proof” in mathematics.
The following MO discussion (written before the book came out) is quite interesting to read in the latter regard. mathoverflow.net/q/87674/17064 The comment below by @andrejbauer is perspicacious as to why such attempts to fully flesh out a published “proof” are difficult to undertake. «Promotion committee: "What have you done in the last

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More from @gro_tsen

12 Nov
Tiens, aujourd'hui je cherchais à savoir quelle est la forme légale de Paris-Saclay, l'article fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercomm… m'apprend qu'il y a des «métropoles», des «communautés urbaines», des «communautés d'agglomération», des «communautés de communes», des «syndicats …
… d'agglomération nouvelle», des «syndicats de communes», des «syndicats mixtes fermés» et «…ouverts», des «pôles métropolitain», des «pôles d'équilibre territorial et rural» et des «pays». Ça ressemble à une blague mais ça n'en est pas.
On a réussi à inventer aussi incompréhensible que le Royaume-Uni avec ses shires / historical counties, ceremonial counties, metropolitan counties, non-metropolitan counties, unitary authorities, etc. #ClubContexte
Read 4 tweets
12 Nov
The absurdity of the Unix system of locales is confounding. If you want to use language xx and the conventions of country YY and encoding ZZZ, you might set locale to xx_YY.ZZZ; but LC_CTYPE only cares about ZZZ, some locale variables about xx, others about YY.
And every one of these xx_YY.ZZZ combinations needs to be “generated”. And on a multi-user machine, since you don't know what your users might want, well, you need to generate them all.
So why couldn't you just set LC_CTYPE=ZZZ, LC_LANGUAGE=xx (perhaps with xx_YY in case you really care about some per-country language differences) and LC_COUNTRY=YY? Because f😡ck you, that's why.
Read 4 tweets
11 Nov
I've recently started reading (or attempting to) Takayuki Kihara's paper ‘Lawvere-Tierney topologies for computability theorists’, I think it will take me a long time to digest, but it really makes me consider computability in a different light. arxiv.org/abs/2106.03061
He defines a generalization of Turing degrees but for partially defined multivalued functions with a secret input; the reduction is defined by a fun three-player game; and he shows that these degrees are isomorphic to L-T topologies on the effective topos (which he defines).
He then proposes that these form a plausible definition of a “world” of computability intermediate between computable mathematics (corresponding to the effective topos) and classical mathematics (corresponding to the topos of sets).
Read 4 tweets
4 Nov
For possible later reference, here is a ✺meta-thread✺ linking to several (long) explanatory threads I've written in the past regarding epidemiology. Since I was often learning as I was tweeting, it's a bit of a mess, but I think it's still worth compiling: ⤵️ •1/9
Let's start with a thread on the basic deterministic SIR model, which was written quite early on (and I didn't fully understand the point made in the thread linked in the next tweet). •2/9
A thread on the difference (“overshoot”) between “herd immunity threshold” and “final attack rate” in the SIR model. •3/9
Read 9 tweets
2 Nov
Le service CheckNews de “Libération” se penche sur la question de si Emmanuel Macron a vraiment été “lauréat” du Concours général de français. Je lis ça d'un œil distrait, et tout d'un coup, ça fait tic: mais 1994, c'est l'année où je l'ai passé! 😮 •1/15 liberation.fr/checknews/emma…
Pas en français: moi je l'ai passé en sciences physique et en maths. Mais j'ai tant l'habitude d'imaginer les politiques en pensant que ce sont des vieux cons croulants que j'oublie que Macron, lui, est un jeune con, il a un an de moins que moi (ou alors je suis vieux 😅). •2/15
Il a un an de moins, mais comme le Concours général de français se passe en première alors que celui de maths et de physique se passe en terminale, ben nous avons été récompensés la même année. Voilà le random fact du jour, j'ai ce point en commun avec le chef de l'État. •3/15
Read 15 tweets
23 Sep
Je suis d'accord avec FX pour dénoncer l'appropriation abusive du mot «chercheur» par des médias, mais l'angle d'attaque me semble mauvais: «c'est un vrai métier» suggère qu'on ne peut faire de recherche qu'en étant payé pour, ce qui est juste faux.
Ne serait-ce qu'historiquement (la science est antérieure au métier de scientifique), ou comme le rappellent l'existence du statut d'émérite, ou les nombreuses contributions que continuent à faire des «amateurs».
Il serait bien de ne pas alimenter cette idée détestable qu'une activité a forcément plus de valeur ou de qualité parce qu'elle est effectuée contre rémunération — parce que c'est un «métier».
Read 4 tweets

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