<story><title>The Erdos Paradox</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.11935</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xamuel</author><text>The paper mentions how Erdos accomplished so much while knowing relatively little machinery. This is, I think, a more general paradox of mathematical research, not limited to Erdos: it&amp;#x27;s a mis-conception that to do important original mathematics you need to be lightyears out there. The reality is, there&amp;#x27;s so much low-hanging fruit it&amp;#x27;s almost silly. But if you want to make a career picking low-hanging fruit, you&amp;#x27;d better be financially independent, because as the paper also points out, mathematical power brokers don&amp;#x27;t appreciate low-hanging fruit-pickers!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hanglow</author><text>Somebody launch the Journal of Low Hanging Fruits: an interdisciplinary journal where people from the research field A pick the low hang hanging fruits from research field B, using knowledge from A. And, conversely, people from B reply by showing those from A that their most cherished result should have been discovered earlier, because is a trivial application of an old technique from B.&lt;p&gt;In mathematics this happens all the time, but there is no dedicated place for this show.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Erdos Paradox</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.11935</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xamuel</author><text>The paper mentions how Erdos accomplished so much while knowing relatively little machinery. This is, I think, a more general paradox of mathematical research, not limited to Erdos: it&amp;#x27;s a mis-conception that to do important original mathematics you need to be lightyears out there. The reality is, there&amp;#x27;s so much low-hanging fruit it&amp;#x27;s almost silly. But if you want to make a career picking low-hanging fruit, you&amp;#x27;d better be financially independent, because as the paper also points out, mathematical power brokers don&amp;#x27;t appreciate low-hanging fruit-pickers!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>total_</author><text>The paper comes across as trivializing how much Erdos knew and more importantly understates his level of mathematics genius. Though, the author probably didn’t intend to and mentions how important his work is in today’s time period.&lt;p&gt;You probably don’t know anything about higher category theory, should I criticize you as a mathematician because you don’t know about it or don’t find it important?&lt;p&gt;Oh wait, you aren’t a mathematician, but you claim to be a software developer? Do you know anything about type theory? No, then how could you claim to be a software developer?&lt;p&gt;Are you a simply-minded programmer? Well, you must only solve low-hanging software problems! Wow! It is amazing how many software development problems you can solve with having such low skill knowledge in programming! That’s amazing!&lt;p&gt;But despite all of that, your work is still not considered deep and worthy of respect because you do not meet the standards of higher level theoretical computer science knowledge! But good for you despite that! Good job!&lt;p&gt;See how condescending that comes across?</text></comment>