Sunday, July 09, 2006
Some perspective, math society
Now I think a lot of you may want to naturally side with the math community when it comes to hearing someone like me warning that hey, maybe something is wrong there, but here's a quick thing you can do:
Do a search on "James Harris" in Google.
Search on my name and in the top ten you will see a link to a Crank.net webpage where I'm excoriated as a "loon", "crackpot", "crank" that bugs the sci.math newsgroup with supposed proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem.
So I'm in the top ten for James Harris's in the United States—according to Google—for bugging math people on Usenet.
If you look at the page, you may think that I spend a lot of time on Usenet talking about Fermat's Last Theorem, but I don't. I used to, as for years I looked for a simple proof, and thought I had one a couple of times, when I didn't. And later I found something that I'm sure is a short proof (though not so simple) and with it in hand, I don't talk about it much.
Why bother? I moved on to other things.
But the page didn't change, and for de-bunking links you can see the dates for those webpages.
It appears to me that the owner of the website has no intention of ever updating the page with facts, but feels quite comfortable presenting me as being someone arguing about Fermat's Last Theorem, indefinitely.
That's the math society I see.
Why bother with the facts when you can play politics?
It's just too freaking inconvenient for that guy maintaining the page to keep up with my mathematical interests, so he just picked one thing, and sits with it—for years.
Like, who gives a damn about the truth?
Cons don't work hard people. That's why they're cons. People who work for a living don't need to cheat. And math people aren't forced to work hard by a public that either fawns over them as "beautiful minds", is terrified of mathematics, or just doesn't know who the hell they are, or care.
But mathematics is so important to our world that without it, the science and technology we have today would not exist.
[A reply to someone who told James that his parents should be proud of him.]
And you just scoot past the oddity of it all.
Why such a big reaction from the math community?
I've found cases of other people with the name "James Harris" having to tell people they are not me.
How is it that I'm such a big deal, but you have someone like the owner of Crank.net trying to say that my research is not important?
Use your brain.
Mathematicians do have a system that relies on the word of other mathematicians in areas they call "pure math", which means that they can as a group declare things to be true, whether they are or not.
IN a political world, politics rule.
They play politics with me because they always play politics, so it's second nature to them, and trying to put a nasty spin on the name "James Harris" is nothing to them.
The math world is not what you think it is, and they don't play by the rules that most of civilized society follows.
Do a search on "James Harris" in Google.
Search on my name and in the top ten you will see a link to a Crank.net webpage where I'm excoriated as a "loon", "crackpot", "crank" that bugs the sci.math newsgroup with supposed proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem.
So I'm in the top ten for James Harris's in the United States—according to Google—for bugging math people on Usenet.
If you look at the page, you may think that I spend a lot of time on Usenet talking about Fermat's Last Theorem, but I don't. I used to, as for years I looked for a simple proof, and thought I had one a couple of times, when I didn't. And later I found something that I'm sure is a short proof (though not so simple) and with it in hand, I don't talk about it much.
Why bother? I moved on to other things.
But the page didn't change, and for de-bunking links you can see the dates for those webpages.
It appears to me that the owner of the website has no intention of ever updating the page with facts, but feels quite comfortable presenting me as being someone arguing about Fermat's Last Theorem, indefinitely.
That's the math society I see.
Why bother with the facts when you can play politics?
It's just too freaking inconvenient for that guy maintaining the page to keep up with my mathematical interests, so he just picked one thing, and sits with it—for years.
Like, who gives a damn about the truth?
Cons don't work hard people. That's why they're cons. People who work for a living don't need to cheat. And math people aren't forced to work hard by a public that either fawns over them as "beautiful minds", is terrified of mathematics, or just doesn't know who the hell they are, or care.
But mathematics is so important to our world that without it, the science and technology we have today would not exist.
[A reply to someone who told James that his parents should be proud of him.]
And you just scoot past the oddity of it all.
Why such a big reaction from the math community?
I've found cases of other people with the name "James Harris" having to tell people they are not me.
How is it that I'm such a big deal, but you have someone like the owner of Crank.net trying to say that my research is not important?
Use your brain.
Mathematicians do have a system that relies on the word of other mathematicians in areas they call "pure math", which means that they can as a group declare things to be true, whether they are or not.
IN a political world, politics rule.
They play politics with me because they always play politics, so it's second nature to them, and trying to put a nasty spin on the name "James Harris" is nothing to them.
The math world is not what you think it is, and they don't play by the rules that most of civilized society follows.
# posted by James Harris @ 18:24 
