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Comment by keltor

16 hours ago

It was required reading for my Logics class in undergrad. Pretty sure it was also on the optionals (aka required) for my Set Theory class as well.

It's also pretty typically a part of History Of Mathematics and Philosophy of Mathematics courses.

37 comments

keltor

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derrida  16 hours ago

No it's not.

No it wasn't.

And you did not read it.

EDIT: source: took logic as undergrad + wrote on the tractatus which required a lot of pre-reqs to understand. 0 chance a course at undergrad level ever assigns principia mathematica. I don't care if you went to yale or oxford or ecole normale ... 0 chance. Most charitable interepretation: some pages of it + was on a bibliography. not required reading.

if feel embarrassed, that is the consequence for lieing. There is such a thing as intellectual honesty.

  • rramadass  14 hours ago

    Well said.

    Thanks for calling out these sort of posers and charlatans on HN. We should not tolerate these people if we are to discuss/argue/motivate interesting/hard subjects productively.

    I automatically discount anybody on HN (until i have looked at their profile/comment history/any personal bio websites etc.) who claim they have read/studied a) Euclid's Elements b) Newton's Principia c) Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism d) Einstein's 1905 Annus Mirabilis papers. e) Principia Mathematica by Russell/WhiteHead f) Godel's Theorem g) Bourbaki's mathematics books etc. etc. They might have browsed it out of curiosity but that is not the same as reading/studying it.

    Actual conceptual mathematics/science is intrinsically hard even ignoring the archaic language/notations.

    As a good example; the Nobel-prize winning physicist S.Chandrasekhar wrote Newton's Principia for the Common Reader where he explains a subset of the principia (only dealing with gravitation) using modern notation and language. He himself found it quite hard and thus the "common reader" in the title is somebody who has had a good course in calculus and has the motivation to put forth the effort in understanding it.

    • eru  13 hours ago

      Einstein's 1905 Annus Mirabilis papers seem like they easiest of the bunch to just read through. I just pulled up 'Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen', the one about Brownian motion, and read the whole thing. It's only 12 pages and fairly accessible; more prose than equations.

      (Of course, if you don't read German, you should get yourself a translation.)

      See https://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~eckern/adp/history/einstei...

      I don't think I'm smart enough to casually read and understand original works on General relativity, but the Annus Mirabilis work seems much simpler. The famous E=MC2 paper is only three pages.

      See https://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~eckern/adp/history/einstei...

      About Gödel: if you are interested in the theorems, and not necessarily their original presentation, you can get plenty of rigorous modern treatments. It's very common for mathematicians to work out simpler proofs and more appealing presentations of famous results over time.

      See https://dn721807.ca.archive.org/0/items/uber-formal-unentsch... if you want to give one of Gödel's work a go. It's only 26 pages. Footnote 48a is especially interesting. Overall the prose is crisp, but the notation is rather archaic to modern eyes.

      I agree with your general sentiment, and your heuristic in general.

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    • fultonn  4 hours ago

      > who claim they have read/studied a) Euclid's Elements

      Of the lot, Elements feels misplaced.

      Lots of people actually do read Elements as part of their course of study. It's niche but there's a whole cottage industry within academia for that sort of thing. There are probably over a dozen institutions that have either a degree program or a core curriculum that is organized around original texts, with Euclid usually serving as the math distribution of that sequence. So running into people who have read (big chunks of) Elements is not that uncommon. That's true even IRL outside of online discussions forums on thread topics that likely select for such people.

      My impression is that this is not really true of the other examples. Except maybe Godel's proofs; I do think a sufficiently motivated instructor could pull a decent chunk of college students through the original text in a semester. Probably better ways to spend everyone's time, though.

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    • lanstin  3 hours ago

      As an Oxford undergrad I read a lot of Bourbaki on topology, to supplement the lectures; they were recommended by the lecturer. I loved their style of writing and the cleanliness of the approach. I have not been assigned Gödel's paper but have read them in classes where the proof was demonstrated. Maths is hard tho, I agree on that, and maths reading very hard, and reading these books outside of class where you are forced to keep going till you understanding is only rarely worth it outside of professional life.

    • my-next-account  10 hours ago

      I've certainly read and studied material explaining f), but I haven't read the original paper (besides, isn't that in German?). The proofs aren't that hard, as I remember them, maybe they're harder in original form? To be clear: I specialized in logic, formal verification and programming language theory at uni. This was a while ago, and I'm on new parent amounts of sleep, so pls b nice.

      6 replies →

    • nonameiguess  11 hours ago

      I don't know the exact curriculum and I'm sure it's changed over the years, but one of my girlfriends from back in the day really did go to a school that had one like this. St. John's College, which has two campuses in Annapolis, MA and Santa Fe, NM. They had no majors and everyone learns by reading the classics directly. They also have to learn classical Latin and Greek and read many in their original languages. I don't know everything they assigned, but I remember at least they actually did learn geometry by reading Euclid and calculus by reading Newton.

      Apparently, the history is that the school lost its accreditation and had to shut down during the Great Depression, so to attract investors and reopen, it adopted an extremely unique identity with no watering down of curriculum and commitment to western classics in an attempt to combat the rise of fascism.

      5 replies →

  • nimih  15 hours ago

    Honestly, other than the length and tedious presentation, I don't really think the material in the Principia Mathematica is outside the reach of an advanced undergraduate. As a point of reference, MIT's capstone mathematical logic course[1] has a syllabus that requires at least as much mathematical maturity, and it wouldn't really surprise me that much to see it as an ancillary or excerpted text.

    That said, even if the OP was assigned the text at some point as an undergraduate, I remain a bit doubtful it was actually read.

    [1] https://cfreer.org/18.515/

    • TimorousBestie  15 hours ago

      > As a point of reference, MIT's capstone mathematical logic course[1] has a syllabus that requires at least as much mathematical maturity,

      The textbooks they use in that course are written in modern notation and are accessible to a knowledgeable reader; neither can be said of the Principia Mathematica. The archaic syntax is a serious issue.

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