<story><title>An Old Conjecture Falls, Making Spheres a Lot More Complicated</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/an-old-conjecture-falls-making-spheres-a-lot-more-complicated-20230822/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>delocalized</author><text>I always wonder what a popular science&amp;#x2F;math magazine would look like if it were oriented towards hackers. In this I mean people who have little background in the field but also the type of person who is used to bluntness and knows to RTFM.&lt;p&gt;I would subscribe to one. Journal articles are often opaque to people who aren&amp;#x27;t already in the field, and popular science falls too often into the storytelling trap seen here.</text></item><item><author>billfruit</author><text>The gossipy narrative style of the article is kind of jarring for an article on a topic like this. It took several paragraphs before it touched on the matter.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CJefferson</author><text>For this particular article, I&amp;#x27;m not sure a hacker version could be much better. I&amp;#x27;m slightly familiar with this area of research, I&amp;#x27;m not sure a more &amp;quot;true&amp;quot; explanation couldn&amp;#x27;t be done in much less than 20 pages of fairly hard maths, and I don&amp;#x27;t imagine anyone would want to chew through that.&lt;p&gt;You could trim this down, but I personally find the background as interesting as the result.</text></comment>
<story><title>An Old Conjecture Falls, Making Spheres a Lot More Complicated</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/an-old-conjecture-falls-making-spheres-a-lot-more-complicated-20230822/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>delocalized</author><text>I always wonder what a popular science&amp;#x2F;math magazine would look like if it were oriented towards hackers. In this I mean people who have little background in the field but also the type of person who is used to bluntness and knows to RTFM.&lt;p&gt;I would subscribe to one. Journal articles are often opaque to people who aren&amp;#x27;t already in the field, and popular science falls too often into the storytelling trap seen here.</text></item><item><author>billfruit</author><text>The gossipy narrative style of the article is kind of jarring for an article on a topic like this. It took several paragraphs before it touched on the matter.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pa7x1</author><text>The gap is very hard to close because there is a chasm between the two. RTFM here means years (typically 5+ for research math) of very focused study to follow what it says. While the popular science tries to convey something that is meaningful to the majority of people without any background exposure. The gap between the two is huge.</text></comment>