• AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    15 hours ago

    Nothing kills my motivation more than discovering something new in math and then finding out some dead guy beat me to the punch by several centuries lol

    Then again sometimes it’s worse when I expect there to be literature on a topic and then discovering there isn’t even a wiki page for it.

    Hell, most recently it was bi-intuitionistic logic. Originally studied in the 40s by one German guy who took bad notes. Main body of work done by a single math grad in the 70s (Rauszer) culminating in her PhD. Turns out there were errors discovered in her proofs and it was proven inconsistent in 2001. Only for two relatively young mathematicians to clear up that there are two separate versions of bi-intuitionistic logic which are consistent. This discovery and proof are found a paper that was published only this fucking year.

    I asked a simple question about dealing with uncertainty in a logical system and instead of finding a well studied foundation of knowledge I was yeeted to the bleeding edge of mathematics.