this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
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At least almost everybody calling themselves a 'polymath' is just a bullshitter.
Today, humanity's collective knowledge about so many things is too deep to actually get in-depth into multiple topics. Hell, you can encounter mathematicians claiming that two mathematicians who study different branches might as well be speaking different languages to each other.
it's worse than different languages. they use the same words to mean entirely different things. so you can say stuff from the same lexicon that means entirely different things to different mathematicians. there are supposed to be analogies that help you translate but jfc I swear to god if I hear one more definition of compactness I'm going to cry. no I'm not going to learn more category theory to understand how I can use a sheaf to translate the different notions because that also doesn't mean what I think it means. shut up shut up shut up words mean things. next you're going to tell me red is blue because color theory staaaahp
self-teaching math is a pain in the ass
Huh. I'm only familiar with the ones that are equivalent to what you would learn in a general topology textbook/course almost right away, i.e. a compact space is a topological space, such that every open cover of the space contains as a subset a finite open subcover of the space. What other ones can you share?
EDIT: forgot a word. Not thinking great right now.
they're supposed to all be versions of that one, it's just not always very easy to see how - joke was mainly about that. category theory calls things compact if they're "small" in a very particular sense. algebraic compactness also has nothing to do with the topological notion, at least on the surface (abelian group that's a direct summand of every group containing it as a pure subgroup). basically, every area of math where the topological notion makes no sense will invariably call something compact eventually, because mathematicians can't resist.
sometimes if you squint you can see how it relates back to the topological notion but frequently it's anything but obvious if you don't already understand the field - which means when you're trying to work things out for yourself, you just have to treat it like one more definition of the same word until you finally get it one day.
I think it's easier if you have a prof who can just make the analogy clear from the start.
The only people close to polymaths in the modern day are white collar professionals who get disillusioned with their field and switch to another later in life because they have the comfort to do so. Every once in a while you see engineers go back to school and become lawyers, lawyers become doctors or things like that. At minimum you are only getting "polymath" status in your forties and you probably aren't unemployed and a writer.