Things I Learned From Websurfing
May 24th, 2007 by WaltI learned several things today from websurfing.
From this comment by elzoro at Not Even Wrong, I learned that Richard Borcherds now has a weblog. The two posts so far are about physics.
From this comment by Peter Woit that the latest issue of the journal Topology is out, and the page that lists the editors is completely blank. (Remember that last year the entire board of Topology resigned to protest the journal’s high subscription fees, and started their own journal, the Journal of Topology.) I think that the publisher has to keep the journal going at all costs, since if the former editors of Topology succeed in completely supplanting their erstwhile journal, the commercial publishers will lose control of mathematical publishing pretty quickly.
From this anonymous comment at Computational Complexity, completely and cynically explains the rationale behind the Clay Millenium Prizes:
The point of the Clay prizes is not to provide motivation to solve the problems (anyone who solves one will have put in far more effort than a million dollars warrants), but rather to tie Clay’s name to the problems, so that nobody will ever discuss the Poincare conjecture without talking about Clay. To accomplish this, the prize has to be impressively large, on the scale of a lottery prize.
May 24th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
I’m as cynical as the next person, if the next person is middling cynical, but I read the Clay Prizes a bit differently:
the extra-mathematical world won’t take these things seriously unless there is money, fame, or media exposure, and preferably all three. Clay Institute guarantees at least the money part.
I doubt the money inspires even one single person to work on the problems who otherwise wouldn’t. In that I agree with the cynical view. But the fact that a million-dollar prize is attached to their solutions does wake the interest of some of my students and non-mathematician friends.
I admit to having mixed feelings about this.
May 26th, 2007 at 2:24 am
You might want the “weblog” to point to the blog, instead of repeating a reference to the comment.
May 26th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Johan: Thanks! Fixed.