= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
atucker comments on Hack Away at the Edges - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (54)
While I agree with this statement, the preceding example doesn't support it. I participated in the polymath project, and while it is true that there were anonymous or pseudonymous contributors, the project was mostly sustained by the fame and communal pull of Gowers and Tao. The retelling of the story you chose made it seem like Tao appeared out of the blue, but in fact Tao and Gowers work in the same field and certainly knew each other beforehand.
Therefore I feel it's not impossible to read the polymath project through the lens of Few Great Men.
Most of the probability of victory flowed through Tao and Gowers, but I don't think that most of the math discovery was done by them?
Like, they caused a bunch of people to hack away at the edges, but I don't think that makes it less supporting of the original point.
I don't know how to quantify how much "math discovery" they did relative to the other participants. You can still read through the comments, so if you have some particular metric you're interested in, that will help clarify the issue. The roughest possible estimate would be in terms of numbered items (the de facto unit of polymath development), and it's clear that Gowers has more of these than any one else.
Thanks for that link.