[FOM] 827: Tangible Incompleteness Restarted/1

[Annatala Wolf]

I understand you are speaking from a hypothetical perspective and not from
your own personal view, but it's hard for me to envision why someone in
mathematics would not view spectral graph theory as math. It is defined
entirely in mathematical terms, has overlap with other areas of
mathematics, and appears in highly-cited refereed scholarly journals of
mathematics.

I have a question. I'm curious about what might make a mathematical
researcher view an area of math as non-mathematical. Do you think it is
that there is not enough active research in the area? Or is it that the
subject is "too easy" to qualify? Or is it simply when the domain has
real-world applications? If the latter, I might agree that research is not
in some sense "pure" when it is directed toward a specific applied purpose,
but that's about as far as I would take the qualification—I don't find it
useful to label something mathematical based on whether it finds utility in
other scientific fields.



On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 12:36 PM Timothy Y. Chow <tchow at math.princeton.edu>
wrote:

> On Wed, 25 Sep 2019, Joe Shipman wrote:
> > No, I meant specifically "computation theory" as practiced by computer
> > scientists in computer science departments, which involves both much
> > mathematics of graph-theoretic and combinatorial types, and much
> > attention to concrete measures like running time, memory space,
> > communication bandwidth, and program size.
>
> Thanks for the clarification.
>
> But I think that the thought process is something like this: They regard
> "computation theory" as "not math."  They might say, chemistry is a fine
> and respectable subject, and if quantum chemists find spectral graph
> theory useful, then more power to them; but that doesn't mean that
> spectral graph theory is math.
>
> Tim
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-- 
/* Annatala Wolf, Lecturer
 * Department of Computer Science and Engineering
 * The Ohio State University
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