I find this style a bit frustrating to read. I just want to know what his proof is, but there's so much fluff in the article that the actual meat is kind of hidden. So anyway, "his" proof is to drop a height to the hypotenuse and use similar triangles. Ah, right, I know this proof and I remember it as the canonical proof my grade 9 geometry textbook presented.
this is the New Yorker not an maa article. it's supposed to be entertaining for a typical New Yorker reader. I swear man some people are so tone deaf it's frustrating: the whole world doesn't cater to people like us. at least try to make at attempt to empathize.
edit:
besides it's literally labeled steps 1-5 (i had no trouble skipping the "fluff" and finding the proof).
I'm sure other people like this style of article. I'm just telling you I don't.
Even the steps 1-5 are a bit fluffy for me. If you had just told me "drop a height to the the hypotenuse and use similar triangles" I would have known what was meant, more succinctly.
Do you have a suggestion on where to get unfluffed math news? I sometimes look at the AMS notices or Terry Tao's blog, but they don't cover quite the same breadth as things like Quanta magazine. I don't know where to get the big news for major events from an unfluffed source. Usually by the time the news has hit Quanta magazine or the NYT, it has already been circulating somewhere else long enough to be old news. I just don't know where else to look.
I guess, but that's a bit of a firehose. Is there really nothing intermediate between the NYT and just scouring all the journals? Something like the AMS notices or Terry Tao's blog, but slightly more frequently updated?
I don't see why it has to be pretension or conceit. Personally I am often frustrated by mainstream maths/science coverage, but that's not because I think I'm special or I'm pretending to be smart: in fact I'm very ignorant, only moderately intelligent, and couldn't follow the journal articles even if I had the time and inclination. My preference is for layman's explanations that guide me through a topic and help me to achieve some level of genuine understanding, and it's perfectly sincere. I'm sure there are people like me but smarter or more knowledgeable, whose preferences are similar but pitched a bit higher.
But this isn't the whole world, or the New Yorker for that matter -- it's the Hacker News comment section. jordigh's frustration is one that could easily be shared by many HN readers. (And in any case it was not presented as anything more than a personal reaction.) I genuinely don't understand why you responded so sharply, and for whatever it's worth I found jordigh's comment useful: it provided a tl;dr of the proof, and helped me decide whether the article would be enjoyable to read.
Eh, if I don't get what I want, so be it. I'm not demanding it. I thought you might know of something like it. If I can get what I was looking for, all the better, though.
Maybe I'm just a very specialised audience: I know enough mathematics to find some popularisations boring but I'm not a research mathematician where I can get gossip via word-of-mouth like I presume must happen. Maybe that's why there just isn't a publication like what I want. There aren't that many maths school dropouts like me who would want to read it.
