On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 09:26:15 AM EDT Ross Street <ross.street@mq.edu.au> wrote:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350567/description/One_of_the_mos...
Perhaps the above article is more good than harm.
Over the years, author Julie Rehmeyer has given birth to quite a litter, http://www.sciencenews.org/view/authored/id/43/name/Julie_Rehmeyer , of mathematically literate news articles, including, for example, a report on the claim of "Vinay Deolalikar, a computer scientist at Hewlett Packard labs in India, [who] sent an email on August 7 [of the year 2010] to a few top researchers claiming that P doesn’t equal NP" -- cf.: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/63252/description/Crowdsourcing_p... The piece you point to strikes me as quite reasonable, actually, apart from the two pairs of paragraphs reporting on the ... umm ... thinking (?) of Messrs. Harper and Spivak, which strike me as being probably accurate depictions of their own cockeyed cocktail-party gibberish. [But then, what do I know? I'm just a retiree from tiny little Wesleyan, after all, not an active respected member of Carnegie Mellon or MIT :-) .] But all the rest is about as close to the mark as a discussion pitched to the interested and sympathetic layperson can possibly be. Cheers, and thanks for pointing that piece out, -- Fred [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]