Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I came into the link ready to nitpick the choices (for some reason which I really should examine), but it's actually a nice birds-eye-view of the field that is rare to see. I feel like mathematicians, perhaps more than most, tend to stay siloed within our specialized subtopics.



I belive it's because math is such a "clean" field that it doesn't take many people to 'clear' a topic and advance a subfield or branch into sub-subfields. So you don't have a large number of people all rooting around in the same area speaking the same language.

With complex sciences like biology, or worse, wet lab experimental science, it takes so much drudgery just to get data to work with, that you can have 100x people working in the same area, trying to cover the data/processing requirements to support theorizing and cataloging discovered entities.


For a fantastic and deep bird eye view my go-to ref is the Princeton companion to mathematics.


A great book in a similar vein is Proofs from THE BOOK by Martin Aigner, Karl H. Hofmann, Günter M. Ziegler.

It's a reference to Paul Erdős and his notion of "The Book" in which God had written down the most beautiful and elegant proofs.


I read the link title and assumed it was referring to things like the "Fundamental Theorem of Algebra" or the "Fundamental Theorem of Number Theory" etc. It was.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: