Comment by schrodinger
1 day ago
Voters: please reconsider your ups and downs. I think the “Are you an expert” question triggered a lot of downvotes when it was in fact asked in good faith to judge the person’s perspective of easy and hard.
1 day ago
Voters: please reconsider your ups and downs. I think the “Are you an expert” question triggered a lot of downvotes when it was in fact asked in good faith to judge the person’s perspective of easy and hard.
And I would say there is no way to ask that question in good faith. (Tedious proof by cases left as an exercise for readers.)
The correct question would have been, does anyone else agree with the statement.
In this particular case, the amount knowledge needed (of e.g. Lean language, math and Erdos problems) means any credible statement about the difficulty requires an expert.
It doesn't require an expert though. That was kind of my point. If you've taken an intro proof class (so the intro class for math majors/the topic), and if you've fiddled with Lean a bit (e.g. played some of the Natural Numbers Game another commenter linked), you'll know it's easy (source: I did math in my undergrad, and have fiddled with Lean a bit). Honestly I expect intro proof classes will start to be centered around something like Lean soonish if some aren't already incorporating it, and we'll see math majors more explicitly making the connection between program and proof.
Like if someone were incredulous that we could reasonably analyze running time and memory usage of something like merge sort and I said that's a standard example in an intro algorithms course, presumably people would be like "yeah it is".
"Are you an expert?" is a perfectly respectful question.