Christian talks on a semi-regular basis about intuition with respect to the work he does in Mathematics. He started talking like that shortly after he entered his junior year in his Applied Math degree at North Carolina State when he moved from solely applied math to more theoretical stuff, first in an introductory class titled Foundations of Advanced Mathematics and then on to Mathematical Analysis (I think that was an introduction to Real Analysis) and other more theoretical work in Abstract Algebra, etc., etc.

Yesterday the subject of mathematical intuition came up at work. A fellow who did his PhD in the same intensely mathematical area of engineering as Christian talked with me a little bit about what Christian was up against. He said something to the effect that the math of Information Theory (Christian’s area) is very complex, but no more so than other areas of higher math. The problem, he said was that intuitions, for him, in that area of math were much more difficult than the other areas he had studied. We did not have time to get to the underlying reasons for that but now it has me curious. That idea was intimated in the book I read on Information Theory, some of it having to do with the way entropy is defined differently in Information Theory than in Physics. It will be interesting to understand the why of that a little more.

Betty Blonde #297 – 09/07/2009
Betty Blonde #297
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