I went to a talk yesterday given by an eminent mathematician. He spoke on two related topics, one of which I listened to avidly, and the other I ended up completely tuning out.<\/p>\n
From the perspective of the speaker the two topics were strongly related to each other. Yet from my perspective they couldn’t have been more different.<\/p>\n
The difference was that for the topic I liked, I could form a geometric model in my head of the fundamental argument. Once I saw this geometry, everything became intuitive. I could play with it in my head, test the ideas for myself, and try out variations of his argument.<\/p>\n
For the other topic, as far as I could tell, there was no geometric intuition — the arguments seemed purely symbolic. Intellectually, I could see how it might be interesting, but emotionally I felt no connection.<\/p>\n
I guess it’s a good thing I’m in the field of computer graphics. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I went to a talk yesterday given by an eminent mathematician. He spoke on two related topics, one of which I listened to avidly, and the other I ended up completely tuning out. From the perspective of the speaker the two topics were strongly related to each other. Yet from my perspective they couldn’t have … Continue reading “Geometric intuition”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9480"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9480"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9482,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9480\/revisions\/9482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}