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Thursday, September 22, 2016

Why focusing on usefulness works for me

A few years ago found myself more and more focused on usefulness of ideas, whereas primarily before was focused on discovery, which can lead to a lot of effort and time spent on validation once something is found.

Turns out it can take a LOT of work to evaluate an idea, and in mathematics at first I was focused on established authority. But that turned out to be frustrating, and you can feel bad bugging people not interested. The web though let me focus on usefulness as to how useful something appeared to be based on interest.

Is so wild, when you share some ideas and can see them loop around the world.

Whether we realize it or not, mathematics is a massively huge subject where few can bother to get a good grasp of it, if that's even possible now for a single human, where what is known and used determines the focus of the human species. If you dig deep you can find mathematical ideas that just don't get a lot of people using them for whatever reason, and they stay buried. The attraction isn't there.

But like back in 1999, I decided to use x+y+vz=0(mod x+y+vz). And eventually decided to call it a tautological space as is an identity. Eventually I decided to call a result I derived with it a binary quadratic Diophantine iterator or BQD Iterator for short, and you can search on that and find out LOTS.

That's not about me. That's about usefulness to others.

External validation from the establishment would be ok, I guess but for me? Too much work. And besides, I don't need it. Discovered more probably thanks to not having it, which is perspective learned. And then don't have to feel guilty bugging not interested people just because they happen to be mathematicians.

Now I've ended actively searching for new ideas completely which is such a relief. Finding new ideas is easier than checking them, and easier than validating them, but is still HARD.

But thanks to the web, seeing use is easier than all of that.


James Harris