Science Memes

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submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (16 children)

Yeah, it's an in-group exclusivity signifier.

Shame, math is some of the worst at this, everything is named after some guy, so there's 0 semantic associativity, you either know exactly which Gaussian term they mean, or you are completely clueless even though they just mean noise with a normal distribution.

edit: Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It's so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they're just using an esoteric term to describe something you've used forever.

[–] Technus 14 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Trying to teach yourself higher math without a textbook is nearly impossible.

You could try just Googling all the Greek letters and symbols but have fun sifting through the hundred-odd uses of σ for the one that's relevant to your context. And good fucking luck if it's baked into an image.

The quickest way I've gotten an intuition for a lot of higher math things was seeing it implemented in a programming language.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I've been learning crypto math the hard way, it's brutal.

I've found one way that works is to learn about the people, like learn about Gauss's life and work, it helped give me context and perspective for the random terms.

[–] Technus 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, it can be really helpful to understand the context and the problems they were trying to solve.

Like for example, I think a lot of pop-sci talk about Special/General Relativity is missing huge chunks of context, because in reality, Einstein didn't come up with these theories out of thin air. His breakthrough was creating a coherent framework out of decades of theoretical and experimental work from the scientists that came before him.

And the Einstein Field Equations really didn't answer much on their own, they just posed more questions. It wasn't until people started to find concrete solutions for them that we really understood just how powerful they were.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

GR is fascinating, because it's something you actually can spend a long, long time completely failing to observe.

Basically until you either try to understand galaxies, or you've got a pesky drift issue with your satellites, you don't need to think about it much at all. Well I suppose if you want to understand why gravity is sometimes weird but you can just ignore that for a really long time.

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