alt.hn

5/16/2025 at 5:08:02 PM

New 'Superdiffusion' Proof Probes the Mysterious Math of Turbulence

 https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-superdiffusion-proof-probes-the-mysterious-math-of-turbulence-20250516/

by rbanffy

5/17/2025 at 2:39:44 AM

I'm trying to read the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.10732 to get a sense of things in more detail (probably quite helplessly).

It's talking about ellipticity. Should I be imagining a kind of tightly packed set of ellipses at all scales and shapes (kind of undulating or expanding and collapsing I guess)?

Does anyone have a better gloss-level sense of "the new method"?

by schuyler2d

5/16/2025 at 7:06:21 PM

If turbulence wasn't such a pain in the butt, we wouldn't exist.

The article reads like there's a more rigorous proof of some classical renormalization results. I wish it had connected the renormalization results to empirical utility for applications.

by RhysU

5/16/2025 at 7:56:52 PM

of course it's quantamagazine. Such a weird journal, I still wonder who's the audience.

by codesnik

5/16/2025 at 8:47:57 PM

Quanta magazine is one of my absolute favorite read-for-pleasure publications.

Scientific American filled a similar niche but used significantly less rigor. Physorg overly sensationalizes every single article and thus has zero credibility. Physics Magazine is an absolute gem but is limited in scope to physics and thus omits computer science, biology, and mathematics.

So quanta fills a niche for people interested in news from other fields without grossly overstaying results and is willing to go into just a bit more detail than usual. It's a wonderful niche for the curious and the source publications are usually just a click away.

Instead of rhetorically dismissing people that like it, can you explain what you do NOT like about it?

by Enginerrrd

5/17/2025 at 2:16:07 PM

Not OC, but it seems like the niche quanta occupies is letting non-mathematicians try to give analogies to help explain research mathematics to a lay audience.

There are problems with this.

1) there is no such thing as explaining research mathematics to a lay audience. At most you walk away with a feeling, and some cool buzzwords.

2) The algorithm quanta writers follow to layify mathematics is roughly to layify definitions without the oversight of someone who knows whether they've broken the essence of that definition. they do this a couple of times and its guaranteed that the layified version bears no resemblance to the reality.

3) the human interest element (which is always 10 times more coherently written than the explanation of the research, because this is what the quanta journalists can actually do without expertise) ends up being the point. Since the biographical snippets are the hook, they end up acting more like a freak show for living mathematicians (many of whom are quite weird!).

This is not, I think, good for mathematics as a whole.

by mathgradthrow

5/17/2025 at 12:11:44 PM

oh, here you are!

ok, for me it's a strange hybrid of pop-science with some newyorker style storytelling which seems to be written in a way for reader to somehow enjoy just an amount of words used. I love reading scientific news, but I'm not sure what's so interesting about what kind of coffee drinks specific scientist behind it and what is their morning routine. And when I skip over that stuff, actual description of the discovery in question is seriously lacking in details, at least to my taste.

by codesnik

5/16/2025 at 10:28:14 PM

This is me too, it’s a great source of news for areas of science that I’m not an expert in but am curious about.

by malux85

5/16/2025 at 8:29:04 PM

Don't yuck my yum!

by macawfish

5/17/2025 at 5:57:16 PM

" I still wonder who's the audience"

Smart and curious people.

by UltraSane