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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 07 2018, @09:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the pics-or-it-didn't-happen dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

As he was brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of geometry, probability theory, and statistics that had eluded top experts for decades.

Known as the Gaussian correlation inequality (GCI), the conjecture originated in the 1950s, was posed in its most elegant form in 1972 and has held mathematicians in its thrall ever since. "I know of people who worked on it for 40 years," said Donald Richards, a statistician at Pennsylvania State University. "I myself worked on it for 30 years."

[...] No one is quite sure how, in the 21st century, news of Royen's proof managed to travel so slowly. "It was clearly a lack of communication in an age where it's very easy to communicate," [Bo'az] Klartag said.

"But anyway, at least we found it," he added—and "it's beautiful."

[...] The "feeling of deep joy and gratitude" that comes from finding an important proof has been reward enough. "It is like a kind of grace," he said. "We can work for a long time on a problem and suddenly an angel—[which] stands here poetically for the mysteries of our neurons—brings a good idea."

Source: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/elusive-math-proof-found-almost-lost

Abstract

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:49PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:49PM (#718269)

    Throw away your statistics and start looking at people as people, not as cogs in your twisted idea of economy. You may become a better human for it.
    I'll understand if you don't get it or don't want to, it won't come as a surprise.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @10:17PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 07 2018, @10:17PM (#718465) Journal

    Throw away your statistics and start looking at people as people, not as cogs in your twisted idea of economy. You may become a better human for it.

    That would be foolish. Show me the being who can think of seven billion people as seven billion individual people and I'll show you someone who is not human. Neither I nor you have the cognitive ability to think of seven billion anything without using tools like statistics. So when you advise me to throw away one of the few tools we humans have for thinking of large numbers of anything without even the slightest advise as a replacement for that tool, you're just trying to make our collective ignorance worse.

    And of course, you have nothing to say of the rituals of health care itself. Certainly thinking of seven billion people as seven billion people doesn't make health care work any better since one can't help all seven billion people at once (much less help them with that point of view).

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:34PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:34PM (#718511) Journal
    As an aside, you wrote:

    even this FA clearly demonstrates that, on average, retired people are no longer contributing to the humanity progress

    The article didn't, of course. You even had to rationalize why the counterexample of the story wasn't a counterexample. It's just another of your silly assertions. In the distant past, most retired people were dead people. Not much contributing to humanity progress happening there. Meanwhile old people today at least are living long enough to inspire younger generations, do a modest amount of work, and come up with interesting ideas like this one.

    It does make me wonder why someone can exhort me to think of people as people, and then make glaring errors of thought like the above. It's almost like viewpoint is inherently broken.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:46PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:46PM (#718752)

      Meanwhile old people today at least are living long enough to inspire younger generations, do a modest amount of work, and come up with interesting ideas like this one.

      Oh! So you do agree that at least some of the retired people today provide value for the society and worth prolonging their life with mere years, in defiance of your "changing one's life span (if you're male) from 75 years to 80... Not very interesting at present for the money spent." assertion?

      How do you manage to keep the two conflicting ideas in your head in the same time?

      The article didn't, of course.

      Of course it didn't. Glad you actually got it, your "What's new about that?" didn't sound too encouraging.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:49AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:49AM (#719154) Journal

        So you do agree that at least some of the retired people today provide value for the society and worth prolonging their life with mere years, in defiance of your "changing one's life span (if you're male) from 75 years to 80... Not very interesting at present for the money spent." assertion?

        Who said otherwise? Not me. Read the end of the quote you put up there. "Not very interesting for money spent." Why is it so hard to think about cost? I guess it's just a perception and cognitive problem common to all humans.

        I think if living that five years more meant someone had to die, you'd get it real fast. But when it's just boatloads of money getting pushed around, you don't see the lives being squandered.