I apologize for spamming with two posts on the same day about the same content, but I actually wrote this post first. It was waiting to be moderated for several days, so I wrote the other one and submitted it, and to my surprise it was immediately published. I guessed this one must have gotten stuck in a queue or something, so I rewrote it and published it. My bad, we’ll definitely go one at a time from now on.
But in a way it’s fitting, as having two introductory posts should definitely indicate just how slow the pace of this series is going to be.
I am looking forward to this. I did math olympiads at high school, then switched to computer science, and then spent a few decades writing apps that read values from database, display them in HTML, and store the edited values again in the database (always in some new framework, so I have to keep running and yet remain at the same place). Sometimes I wonder where the alternative paths could have lead. It seems that my brain is still capable of understanding math; I can read about new topics and develop some intuition about them (and verify it with people who actually understand the stuff). Understanding the category theory would… well, feel good; as if I am getting a glimpse into the alternative universe where I continued doing math.
Sometimes things are explained in an unnecessarily difficult way. I understand that if you are a university professor teaching X, and you know that all your students learned Y during the previous year, it makes sense to write a textbook of X assuming deep and fresh knowledge of Y. But because of job and kids, I don’t have the time to walk the exact path of a university student, so I would appreciate shortcuts.
I apologize for spamming with two posts on the same day about the same content, but I actually wrote this post first. It was waiting to be moderated for several days, so I wrote the other one and submitted it, and to my surprise it was immediately published. I guessed this one must have gotten stuck in a queue or something, so I rewrote it and published it. My bad, we’ll definitely go one at a time from now on.
But in a way it’s fitting, as having two introductory posts should definitely indicate just how slow the pace of this series is going to be.
I am looking forward to this. I did math olympiads at high school, then switched to computer science, and then spent a few decades writing apps that read values from database, display them in HTML, and store the edited values again in the database (always in some new framework, so I have to keep running and yet remain at the same place). Sometimes I wonder where the alternative paths could have lead. It seems that my brain is still capable of understanding math; I can read about new topics and develop some intuition about them (and verify it with people who actually understand the stuff). Understanding the category theory would… well, feel good; as if I am getting a glimpse into the alternative universe where I continued doing math.
Sometimes things are explained in an unnecessarily difficult way. I understand that if you are a university professor teaching X, and you know that all your students learned Y during the previous year, it makes sense to write a textbook of X assuming deep and fresh knowledge of Y. But because of job and kids, I don’t have the time to walk the exact path of a university student, so I would appreciate shortcuts.