In mathematics, a "classification" means making a list of all possible objects of a given type.
Classification results are some of Ciro Santilli's favorite: Section "The beauty of mathematics".
Examples:
- classification of finite simple groups
- classification of regular polytopes
- classification of closed surfaces, and more generalized generalized Poincaré conjectures
- classification of associative real division algebras
- classification of finite fields
- classification of simple Lie groups
- classification of the wallpaper groups and the space groups
As shown in Video "Simple Groups - Abstract Algebra by Socratica (2018)", this can be split up into two steps:This split is sometimes called the "Jordan-Hölder program" in reference to the authors of the jordan-Holder Theorem.
Good lists to start playing with:
History: math.stackexchange.com/questions/1587387/historical-notes-on-the-jordan-h%C3%B6lder-program
It is generally believed that no such classification is possible in general beyond the simple groups.
accounts for them all, which we know how to do due to the classification of finite fields.
So we see that the classification is quite simple, much like the classification of finite fields, and in strict opposition to the classification of finite simple groups (not to mention the 2023 lack of classification for non simple finite groups!)
If you are a pussy and work a soul crushing job, this is one way to lie to yourself that your life is still worth living: do one cool thing every day.
Find a time in which your mind hasn't yet been destroyed by useless work, usually in the morning before work, and do one thing you actually like in life.
Work a little less well for you boss, and a little better for yourself. Ross Ulbricht:Selling drugs online is not advisable however.
I hated working for someone else and trading my time for money with no investment in myself
Even better, try to reach an official agreement with your employer to work 20% less than the standard work week. For example, you could work one day less every week, and do whatever you want on that day. It is not possible to push your passion to weekends, because your brain is too tired. "You keep all non-company-related IP you develop on that time" is a key clause obviously.
On a related note, good employers must allow employees to do whichever the fuck "crazy projects", "needed refactorings or other efficiency gains" and "learn things deeply" at least 20% of their time if employees want that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20%25_Project. Employees must choose if they want to do it one day a week or two hours per day. One day per month initiatives are bullshit. Another related name: genius hour.
Highly relevant on this topic: Video "What Predicts Academic Ability? by Jordan B Peterson (2017)".
Maybe you will be fired, but long term, having tried, or even succeeded your dream, or a one of its side effects, will be infinitely more satisfying.
The same goes for school, and maybe even more so because your parents can still support you there. Some Gods who actually followed this advice and didn't end up living under a bridge:
- George M. Church "[We] hope that whatever problems... contributed to your lack of success... at Duke will not keep you from a successful pursuit of a productive career." Lol, as of 2019 the dude is the most famous biotechnologist in the world, those "problems" certainly didn't keep him back.
- Freeman Dyson proved the equivalence of the three existing versions of quantum electrodynamics theories that were around at his time, and he has always been proud of not having a PhD!
- Ramanujan, from Wikipedia:
He received a scholarship to study at Government Arts College, Kumbakonam, but was so intent on mathematics that he could not focus on any other subjects and failed most of them, losing his scholarship in the process.
- Person that Ciro met personally and shall remain anonymous for now for his privacy: once Ciro was at a bar with work colleagues casually, it was cramped, and an older dude sat next to his group.The dude then started a conversation with Ciro, and soon he explained that he was a mathematician and software engineer.As a Mathematician, he had contributed to the classification of finite simple groups, and had a short Wiki page because of that.He never did a PhD, and said that academia was a waste of time, and that you can get as much done by working part time a decent job and doing your research part time, since you skip all the bullshit of academia like this.Yet, he was still invited by collaborating professors to give classes on his research subject in one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Students would call him Doctor X., and he would correct them: Mister X.As a software engineer, he had done a lot of hardcore assembly level optimizations for x86 for some mathematical libraries related to his mathematics interests. He started talking microarchitecture with Ciro's colleagues.And he currently worked on an awesome open source project backed by a company.At last but not least, he said he also fathered 17 children by donating his sperm to lesbian mothers found on a local gay magazine, and that he had met most/all of those children after they were born.A God. Possibly the most remarkable person Ciro ever met, and his jaw was truly dropped.
Gandhi TODO source:
You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind
The only cases where formal proof of theorems seem to have had actual mathematical value is for theorems that require checking a very large number of case, so much so that no human can be fully certain that no mistakes were made. Some examples:
In the classification of finite simple groups, groups of Lie type are a set of infinite families of simple lie groups. These are the other infinite families besides te cyclic groups and alternating groups.
A decent list at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_finite_simple_groups, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_Lie_type is just too unclear. The groups of Lie type can be subdivided into:
- Chevalley groups
- TODO the rest
The first in this family discovered were a subset of the Chevalley groups by Galois: , so it might be a good first one to try and understand what it looks like.
TODO understand intuitively why they are called of Lie type. Their names , seem to correspond to the members of the classification of simple Lie groups which are also named like that.
But they are of course related to Lie groups, and as suggested at Video "Yang-Mills 1 by David Metzler (2011)" part 2, the continuity actually simplifies things.
The following things come to mind when you look into research in this area, especially the search for BB(5) which was hard but doable:
- it is largely recreational mathematics, i.e. done by non-professionals, a bit like the aperiodic tiling. Humbly, they tend to call their results lemmas
- complex structure emerges from simple rules, leading to a complex classification with a few edge cases, much like the classification of finite simple groups
Bibliography:
Ciro Santilli intends to move his beauty list here little by little: github.com/cirosantilli/mathematics/blob/master/beauty.md
The most beautiful things in mathematics are results that are:
- simple to state but hard to prove:
- Fermat's Last Theorem
- transcendental number conjectures, e.g. is transcendental?
- basically any conjecture involving prime numbers:
- many combinatorial game questions, e.g.:
- surprising results: we had intuitive reasons to believe something as possible or not, but a theorem shatters that conviction and brings us on our knees, sometimes via pathological counter-examples. General surprise themes include:Lists:
- classification of potentially infinite sets like: compact manifolds, etc.
- problems that are more complicated in low dimensions than high like:
- generalized Poincaré conjectures. It is also fun to see how in many cases complexity peaks out at 4 dimensions.
- classification of regular polytopes
- unpredictable magic constants:
- why is the lowest dimension for an exotic sphere 7?
- why is 4 the largest degree of an equation with explicit solution? Abel-Ruffini theorem
- undecidable problems, especially simple to state ones:
- mortal matrix problem
- sharp frontiers between solvable and unsolvable are also cool:
- attempts at determining specific values of the Busy beaver function for Turing machines with a given number of states and symbols
- related to Diophantine equations:
- applications: make life easier and/or modeling some phenomena well, e.g. in physics. See also: explain how to make money with the lesson
Good lists of such problems Lists of mathematical problems.
Whenever Ciro Santilli learns a bit of mathematics, he always wonders to himself:Unfortunately, due to how man books are written, it is not really possible to reach insight without first doing a bit of memorization. The better the book, the more insight is spread out, and less you have to learn before reaching each insight.
Am I achieving insight, or am I just memorizing definitions?
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_qNKbwM_eE Unsolved: Yang-Mills existence and mass gap by J Knudsen (2019). Gives 10 key points, but the truly hard ones are too quick. He knows the thing though.