Connect the Stars (How papers are like constellations ) by KW Regan.
From the post:
Bob Vaughan is a mathematician at Penn State University. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society—not ours, Ben Franklin helped make it tough for us to have one about 236 years ago this Wednesday. He is a great expert on analytic number theory, especially applied to the prime numbers. His work involves the deep connections between integers and complex numbers that were first charted by Leonhard Euler in the time of Franklin.
Today we examine how connections are made in the literature, and how choosing them influences our later memory of what is known and what is not.
Proved mathematical statements are like stars of various magnitudes: claim, proposition, lemma, theorem… A paper usually connects several of the former kinds to a few bright theorems. Often there are different ways the connections could go, and a lengthened paper may extend them to various corollaries and other theorems. Thus we can get various constellations even from the same stars. Consider the Big Dipper and the larger Ursa Major:
I lack the mathematical chops to follow the substance of the post but can read along to see the connections that were made at different times by different people that contributed to what is reported as the present state of knowledge.
How to capture that, dare I say network/graph of interconnections?
Search seems haphazard and lossy.
Writing it out in prose monographs or articles isn’t much better because you still have to find the monograph or article.
What if there were a dynamic network/graph of connections that is overlaid and grows with publications? Both in the way of citations but less formal connections and to less than an entire article?
The social life of research as it is read, assimilated, used, revised and extended by members of a discipline.
That is to say that research isn’t separate from us, research is us. It is as much a social phenomena as prose, plays or poetry. Just written in a different style.
[…] He is a great expert on analytic number theory, especially applied to the prime numbers. His work involves the deep connections between integers and complex numbers that were first charted by Leonhard Euler in the time of … […]
Pingback by Connect the Stars (Graphs Anyone?) « Another Word For It | ALife (Biotechnology, Algorithms, Complexity, AI, ...) | Scoop.it — July 5, 2012 @ 4:07 pm