Mathematician: this is category theory. No, it didn’t have anything to do with categorization, it just helps us understand how spaces can map to each other. Yeah I guess it’s kinda like graph theory or algebra, but not really. We made a category of graphs, and you can use the category of graphs to represent endofunctors on the category of categories.
– It’s about nothing.
– No sets?
– No, forget the sets.
– You’ve got to have sets.
– Who says you’ve got to have sets? Remember when we were talking about functions of functions? That could be a theory all by itself.
I don’t know that much of history, but by my accounts category theory is metagaming the metagame of the original mathematics metagamers.
It’s a strange feeling to think you understand what you are reading until you get to the end, but you have given me that feeling. I was like “yeah category that’s a word I know. Let’s math the hell out of some categories.” Then I recognized other words you said, but by the time I was at the end of your post I wasn’t sure if I understood anything.
I don’t mind feeling dumb. Honestly it helps keep my narcissism in check. I like math because I don’t understand all of it even though it should be logical.
If it helps, category theory is affectionately referred to by mathematicians as “generalized abstract nonsense”.
It can be very confusing, but it’s sort of a field of math that helps to relate ideas on one area to similar ones in another domain.
I’ve read a fair few unintuitive mathematical things, but category theory has so far been the worst. Some things are just plain unintuitive and don’t catch your attention. Then there are things that are intuitive and really do reel you in. Finally there are things that seem intuitive but become so complex that your comprehension inverses: what you thought you knew feels wrong because of the new things you learned.
The latter has been my experience with category theory.
If only engineering documentation was as precise and comprehensive as this meme claims…
Yeah it’s a managerial function involving skill and time and therefore money, but if it doesn’t directly translate into profits for the corporation, then who has interest in that kind of investment these days?
Plenty of money exists yes, but there is no “will” to use it in this manner - and those who would, get fired or passed over for promotion by those who move fast & break things. Stock dividends rather than programmer salaries - see e.g. all of the tech sector doing multiple rounds of layoffs rather than make documentation or do anything close to proper maintenance for the things that were just built. However, those are (always) problems for the next CEO to have to worry about.
My engineering friends and me propose that physicists should be referred to as theoretical engineers.
I propose engineers not be allowed to name things. Not everything needs to be an “engineer”
We aren’t the ones who did that. You need to have taken statics and thermo otherwise you’re just a sparkling tradesperson
As someone with an engineering degree and a science degree, scientists are absolutely nothing like engineers.
They’ve got some things in common.
Technical aptitude. Complete unawareness, or purposeful neglect, of social norms. Science related dad jokes.
True, but I mainly mean in terms of their attitude towards research and their level of skepticism and critical thinking when presented with new information.
Engineers are always thinking in terms of “how can I make this work?” and scientists are trained to think in terms of “where does this theory/method break?”
This means that in general, engineers are far more likely to assume one positive result is significant, whereas scientists are far more likely to be looking at and poking holes in experiment methodology. This is a generalization, but in my experience, engineers are far more likely to fall for pseudoscience BS. Granted, my experience is mostly in chemistry and chemical engineering, but this idea in general has been a topic of discussion and research in peer-reviewed literature for years.
Doing research, I used to work with mathematicians, engineers AND physicists on a daily basis for years. Physicists were the least fun. Most of them seemed to think of themselves as a sort of Jesuits of Science. As in: “I just figured this out, and already it’s set in stone, why do you even argue with me?” Mathematicians and engineers were a lot humbler, more down-to-earth. Also, some of them were astonishingly edgy in a very positive way.
There are different kinds of physics researchers and it doesn’t look like what physics lessons show in university, which is mostly theory. Most are not theoricians, they work on experiments and analyze results, they design and build instruments similarly to engineers. It seems the main difference is the kind of question they want to answer to: scientific question vs client need.
Tbf advancement in math usually means “random shit we’re doing for the fun of it” and then 40 years later an actual application is discovered
It took centuries for people to realize number theory could be used for encryption
Wait are we supposed to be making super precise blueprints? They never build what I draw so I just give rough dimensions on a sketch and specify the important bits
