Comment by Jtarii

1 day ago

People are upvoting this because Tao is a celebrity.

I'm upvoting this because it's interesting. I don't have to fully understand something to find it interesting.

  • In what way is it interesting compared to the myriad of other posts on this topic that has content you can understand?

    • I read thru it and most of it is accessible to an undergraduate. As long as you remember what Sym{1,2,3} are (clearly explained in the text), and how a resultant works (many undergraduate textbooks will show you), how SL2 works (reasonably common undergraduate topic), and can figure out the bit about the dual space being the same as those differential operators, everything else is just basic (high school) algebra.

    • It's interesting because I like math, and typically posts like this generate a lot of interesting comments. Plus, in general, I'm wildly disinterested in the AI discourse that eats up 50-75% of the front page, so frankly anything that's slightly more interesting than that gets an upvote from me.

      3 replies →

    • I consider it both interesting and important to stay informed on the capabilities and limitations of frontier AI models. I'm not a mathematician myself -- he might as well be speaking Martian for all I know -- but the opinion and experience of a leading authority in the math field is very relevant to staying abreast of the larger machine-intelligence field.

He’s famous, but I don’t believe he is a celebrity, as he is not famous for his persona.