Good old fashioned Science and Philosophy - Background in Physics, Maths, Complexity, stats&ML „Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen.“ (D. Hilbert)
Germany
Joined September 2026
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"Verification differs from proof precisely because it is analytical, and because it leads to nothing. It leads to nothing because the conclusion is nothing but the premisses translated into another language.
A real proof, on the other hand, is fruitful, because the conclusion is in a sense more general than the premises. The equality 2+2=4 can be verified because it is particular. Each individual enunciation in mathematics may always be verified in the same way.
But if mathematics could be reduced to a series of such verifications, it would not be a science. A chess-player, for instance, does not create a science by winning a piece. There is no science but the science of the general. It may even be said that the object of the exact sciences is to dispense with these direct verifications." - Henri Poincare
“It is certainly not in general the case that by acquiring a good all-round scientific education you so completely satisfy the innate longing for a religious or philosophical stabilization, in face of the vicissitudes of everyday life, as to feel quite happy without anything more. What does happen often is that science suffices to jeopardize popular religious convictions, but not to replace them by anything else. This produces the grotesque phenomenon of scientifically trained, highly competent minds with an unbelievably childlike-undeveloped or atrophied-philosophical outlook.” Erwin Schrödinger
“We deny the thesis of the absolute finitude of the human being, both in the atheistic form of obdurate finitude and in the theistic form where it serves as the basis for the violent drama of crushing despair, revelation, and mercy. Instead, spirit is freedom in the bondage of existence, it is open to infinity. God as the completed infinite can admittedly not be given to us nor come to be given; God can neither break into t he human through revelation nor can the human by mystic contemplation break through to Him. We can only represent the completed infinite in the symbol. All creative shaping by humans receives its deep holiness and dignity from this connection. Yet up to now it has been only in mathematics and physics, as far as I can see, that the symbolic-theoretical construction has taken on such solidity that it is compelling for everyone whose mind opens itself to these sciences.” Hermann Weyl
"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with." - Ada Lovelace
Anatol Wegner retweeted
“The mystery of brilliant productivity will always be the posing of new questions, the anticipation of new theorems that make accessible valuable results and connections. Without the creation of new viewpoints, without the statement of new aims, mathematics would soon exhaust itself in the rigor of its logical proofs and begin to stagnate as its substance vanishes. Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs.”- Felix Klein
Anatol Wegner retweeted
Three words any journal editor should be familiar with: intellectual property, and copyright.
1) Anthropic has already settled a whopping 1.5 Billion lawsuit for copyright infringement, literally admitting to training their models on ***pirated*** materials.
2) Authors DO NOT lose their copyright when they submit to arXiv. Most of us just give arXiv a perpetual non exclusive license and we retain copyright. Training models on our papers without permission is copyright infringement.
3) In the past, when publishing in a journal, the journal kept the copyright of the paper. So many papers that are in the arxiv are actually the copyright property of @ElsevierConnect etc, but such journals have allowed authors to keep copies in the arXiv. Why these publishers are not filling a lawsuit is beyond me.
4) Nowadays journals, like the London Math Society journals, allow authors to retain copyright but the journals have the exclusive rights to publish and reproduce the works. Again why the journals have not filed a lawsuit is beyond me and I hope they do.
5) Source: I'm part of the class action lawsuit against Anthropic for two of my books and payments will be coming soon. The settlement is **peanuts** compared to giving the model companies forever access to train their models on our books.
US judge approves Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement of copyright lawsuit | Reuters share.google/mygFqDM0UkAeYcH…
I struggle to fathom this kind of attitude. OpenAI does not owe mathematicians a single cent. That they are donating $5M to a new Simons Foundation initiative to help mathematicians is commendable.