Can mathematicians even defend this?

Sorry, then I can't help you there. Worry not though, I'm sure that the English speaking part of the world is capable of producing better books on math than a tiny country of 5 million people.

And what's so special about Finnish books?

Googled his twitter, he's a CS major, tweet checks out. Babby needs spoon feeding.

Nothing really, that just happens to be what I've read since I obviously prefer to read books in my native language when possible. Just like every other country we have both terrible and good books. The point was that certainly a population of over 1 billion people can produce better books than a population of mere 5 million people.

They can't and if they do they're lying.

The problem is not just with books, papers also are generally terrible with giving intuition and presenting things in a pedagogical order.

The definition/theorem/proof style needs to die.

Tbh this is why I like to study out of order.

Black box details in order to get to the interesting stuff first, and then go back and fill in details as necessary to do proofs.

>intuitively intuit the intuition
Kant, is that you?

You don't need to understand the motivatio, you take it at face value and then evaluate the theorems based on the definitions.

I can define 1+2=3 because fuck you. Doesn't matter if it makes sense to you or is even useful, as long as it's consistent

If you don't understand the definitions in a paper, it's likely that you lack the expected pre-reqs for it and shouldn't be reading it in the first place.

Working with the definition and seeing what properties it holds is how you gain intuition. For example, if you introduced compactness as an analogue of finiteness, the reader wouldn't understand why this is so. It's only after exploring how compact sets work with continuous maps that this becomes clear.
>CSfag is a brainlet
How surprising.

A new definition needs to be motivated. There is a difference between understanding *what* it says and understanding *why* it is being defined that way. Most papers don't convey this at all, or they do so very poorly.

Of course, if you are relying on common concepts then the burden would fall on textbooks etc. to explain it properly (which again they usually don't do very well).

Papers are far, far worse than books in this regard.
The entirety of mathematical publishing is just a Kafkaesque game of taking turns publishing unreadable papers and wasting hours upon hours piecing together unreadable papers.

Imagine being this stupid

>Of course, if you are relying on common concepts then the burden would fall on textbooks etc. to explain it properly (which again they usually don't do very well).
Even if they are "common concepts", if they go beyond knowledge of a skilled university graduate, they should at least lead with proper references to books/review articles. Your paper should tell the full story, either by citing references which supply the information or by developing the necessary parts yourself. If it takes longer, attach an Appendix/Supplementary Material. Of course every skilled reader could figure out these parts himself, but it would be wasted time which they could spend advancing the field themselves.

I don't need to imagine it. :^)

>Kant, is that you?
Yes.

But then why'd you do it? There is no point in just memorizing definitions and theorems. Every time some innovative method or idea is introduced in mathematics it happened because some guy took their intuition to the stars and after getting a solid grasp of his strategy he then laid down the formalism.

I'm a formalist too but I am getting tired of this edgy teen phase that formalism is going through. "Just don't need to understand the motivation. 1+2=3 because fuck you. Nothin personnel kid."

Agreed

I don't have time for all that shit. I only write papers so I don't get kicked out.

>being too beta to contact the author and asking them for supplementary material

Certain books should be treated as reference while others for learning. A good reference book is good for solidifying knowledge you already have while a book for learning is obviously better for learning

Mathematics is not about motivation.

>contacting somebody like
for clarification
>"I am sorry, I am currently busy writing the next paper, I will get back to you once I have time to figure out the stuff I was handwaving at that time."
>crickets
People's interest in making their own work accessible seems to drop off surprisingly fast after the reviewers are through with it.

>motivating a definition

embarrassing proposal

That brainlet must have been reading some shitty ass precalc book.

common anti-pattern of software engineers: going into places they don't belong and thinking they know how things should be done

>can mathematicians even defend this?

Fucking dumbass

It's done because it provides interesting results. It's up to you to examine the truthfulness of the statement and then apply it.

If an apple didn't fall n newton's head, would you complain about his laws of motion?

Another common anti-pattern of software engineers: using the word "anti-pattern".

Their lutefisk is made of ground up wizards

>reading books in 2018
TOP FUCKING KEK

wtf is anti-pattern
>Common anti-pattern of software engineers: Making up undefined terms and having the reader spend 0 seconds trying to figure out what the hell the author even means because he is a brainlet -v

muh motivation, why cant all math texts be like the one i used for calc 1? durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

meanwhile pretty much every undergrad math book ive read actually has motivation. like rudin and shit has your motivation in the front page of every chapter. do you want a fuckin drawing and shit ? lol

It's basically code for "bad thing you shouldn't do."

>heh, look at how smarts I am, reading these dry-ass books! Nothin' personnel...

>9406361
my made-up etymology that i assume is wrong: software engineers care about "design" patterns which are certain ways of structuring relationships between different chunks of code in large software projects. an "anti-pattern" is a counterproductive way of organizing software projects that is commonly enough encountered in the real world to be considered a pattern in software design. this is later applied to anything analogously considered bad common practice in another area of anything, since software engineers love to use random words like "antipattern" and "orthogonal" instead of english

Glad to see the old mathematicians wearing the emperor's new clothes are being revealed for the naked people they are as the millenials of the information age slowly creep in to take their place and clear it up. There's hope for math yet.

i don't get what's the fucking problem, just pop some addy and you can read the whole book in a day while retaining most of the information

t. pajeet

If I had the patience I would come back here with an image of a comment on Hacker News filled with nearly every software engineering buzzword.

Really the issue with the definition/theorem approach is that it leads students to believe that mathematics begins with definitions and ends in theorems. In reality this is pretty much the opposite of what working mathematics looks like.

Of course, this problem is quite older than mathematics itself so it's not like some millenial shitters who don't even work in math are going to change it.

I think guys like 3Blue1Brown are going to raise the standards for people in terms of what they expect from educational mathematics to an unrealistic level.

>anti-pattern
I love CS brainlets trying to force their fucktarded terminology

You're supposed to stop being garbage before you reach the level where the textbook isn't offering motivation any more.
Then his complaint makes even less sense. Math textbooks at that level, especially the ones a CS student would read, drown the reader in motivations and applications.

He seems to miss the fact that learning and doing mathematics is all the motivation one needs

>author is are
He should go back to wherever he's from

>branlet twoots about struggling with calc 2
what is supposed to be defended here?

>Opinion discarded...

Idk. All math/physics books i had in elementary and in HS were like this:
1. definition + formula
2. 30 problems where you just put the numbers into the formula and compute it on paper.
3. go to step 1.

I do not blame people for not liking math or physics or chemistry, if they know it only from schools similar to mines.

>Your paper should tell the full story, either by citing references which supply the information or by developing the necessary parts yourself. If it takes longer, attach an Appendix/Supplementary Material
You are retarded. For some research topics there are no surveys or reviews yet, for some papers the full story is literally "I didn't like technical detail X in paper Y so I did it another way" without any connection to results or motivation of the result of Y, for most papers the target audience are researchers in the same field, not undergrads or even researchers from other fields and the writer doesn't give a shit about them. Adding story is in the best case wasted time and space, in the worst case some reviewer doesn't agree with your motivation and you get rejected.

Not all definitions need motivation, some are technical convenience, some are needed for a single theorem and their motivation is that the writer looked for some structure to proof this theorem and the definition itself has no intuition on its own.

A paper needs motivation, but not every concept within needs one.

>elementary/HS math.
While I'm sure there are great books for elementary/HS-level math, I'd say it's the teacher's job to handle the motivation part there.

Most kids at that level probably don't even read the books and only use them for the exercises (Totally projecting here)

Teacher was there to write the solutions on table over and over and grade our tests.

University is much better tho. Guess they cant hire brainlets to teach there.

Comes with the fact that university professors need to know their stuff

A shame, I can see how that would make one hate math. I guess I was lucky for having great elem/HS math teachers.

Except that it's not how it came to be. Mathematicians didn't first define compactness and see where it lead them. They had some idea of the properties they needed and tried to set a good flexible definition that would imply those properties.
Why would students get the motivation by themselves ? I'm not saying that textbooks should spend a chapter on exposition but just introducing compactness as an analogue of finiteness is not a bad idea. Then you have a main thread for the rest of the chapter where you emphasize how many properties we get for compact sets are convenient properties of finite sets.

One guy struggling with one book? Why does this need defended?

>Not all definitions need motivation

>technical convenience
>needed for a single theorem
But... aren't those motivations? Are there any cases of someone just making up a random definition for no reason?

>one book
Read again: "Common anti-pattern of math books"

one guy struggling with math....geez this is something to get worked up over.

That's true. This gets to the heart of it - if mathematicians were forced to write about (and therefore think about) their motivations they would realize that they're just churning out babble that isn't that important in the grand scheme of things.

git gud

lol mathematicians are always a few hundred years ahead of the rest of humanity, maybe the next millenium physics brainlets may find an use for our cutting edge mathematical theory

Truth is most math books (especially at the graduate level) aren't there to learn from, they're there for professors to teach from and as a handy repository for the proofs/theorems/homework-problems that the professor can't always keep in their head and needs to refer to during lecture ("I won't prove this now but it's in your book so you can look it up at your leisure.")

Mathematicians DON'T WANT YOU TO LEARN ON YOUR OWN. They want you to pay for their classes and learn from them. As such they're not going to put a whole bunch of effort into nice diagrams and expository text in their books since that not only takes up their time but contributes to making them obsolete as educators. 90% of the work that academic mathematicians (the guys that would actually be writing textbooks in the first place) do is teaching.

The other 10% is racing frantically with other mathematicians around the world to prove the hottest new theorems and publish a paper so they can get their tenure. Contributing to self-education would only serve to increase the number of people they would potentially be competing with. Mathematicians want to have strict control over the number of professional working mathematicians since there's not enough low-hanging proofs to go around and they're lazy.

Cool conspiracy theory. Got any evidence? Otherwise go back to .

Just because you're a brainlet doesn't mean everyone is or there exists some conspiracy

"Conspiracy" implies multiple actors working together, I made no such claim. Every mathematician working through the logic independently would reach the same conclusion: that publishing books as anything other than classroom reference is a bad deal for them personally. It's not something that has to be all or nothing; other mathematicians not sharing this view would not affect the calculus, since even one good book that goes unpublished (theirs) lowers the probability of losing students/gaining competition.

Barinlet

>mfw brainlets don't learn Finnish for the sake of being able to use the vastly superior Finnish literacy to ramp up their game 1000 fold, and instead they keep wasting their time on objectively inferior """books""" (basically just some PP notes, based on babelfish translations of the Finnish masterpieces, plastered on sheets of paper).

Admittedly, the first paragraph is quite reasonable - it's indeed better if the professor selects some topics and proofs for a lecture. Self-studying with most of these books is extremely time-consuming - but it's not impossible with some discipline and mathematical maturity.

The rest of your post, however, is disturbingly absurd...

what are some real comp sci topics?

(you)

Computer graphics is pretty legit f a m.

(((you)))

God forbid you actually think about why the definition makes sense. My favorite part of math books is that you're constantly challenging yourself to understand why something is defined the way it is until you get it.

For example I like Lancaster and Blundle way more than Peskin and Schroeder, which is funny, since P&S is the standard novel for most universities.

>intuitively intuit the intuition
kek

If they were really ahead they would be able to extract the physics implications themselves.

Have you ever actually talked to a tenured mathematician? Usually they are happy to help people learn in any way possible. The whole point of academia is that it's for people who don't care about (and shouldn't have to care about) money.

Also, give one (1) example of a book that was prevented from being published due to this reason.

You can easily publish a book on a website even if it can't get through the evil publishers who want to monopolize all knowledge.

Most of them just flaunt how much better they are then you at math for masterbatory reasons

Don't be so angry - you can really feel better than most mathematicians for being so selfless!

They must strike a careful balance. Obviously they're not just going to tell people to fuck off.

Also
>tenured
After this point they can help anyone as much as they want. Though you still run the risk of having your research ideas stolen by them.

Dumbass. No one is "preventing" good books from being published. Mathematicians simply choose not to write them.

The problem with this logic is that the vast majority of math textbooks are written by old farts. Everybody young is too busy scrabbling for publications so they can keep their adjunct position.

>>almost everyone else

you retards need to fuck off and stop talking about things you know jack shit about

Well here we run into the simple fact that writing a good textbook is simple more work than writing a bad one. Old farts are notoriously lazy, after all.

You sound upset.

This is what you're supposed to do.

>anti-pattern
>reverse engineering
lol
cslets btfo

What are some books that are exceptions to this? The only notable book that comes to mind for me is an intro prob/stats book written by a guy at Harvard projects.iq.harvard.edu/stat110/home

I just use what my professor is asking me to use desu. Is it bad?

Neukirch's "Algebraic Number Theory" may be relatively hard to digest but it explains very well why certain concepts make sense.
But it's also important not to read the books in a linear manner - if you don't understand a definition or some steps in a proof, just feel free to look where the concept / method comes to use later.