Correct Up to a Constant
Copyright: Sanjay Basu On Terence Tao, six ideas that have been quietly running the world for four thousand years, and what happens when the machines start doing the easy parts I have had a long and complicated relationship with mathematics, and I want to be precise about which parts were love and which parts were hate. The love was the concepts. I could see them. Somebody explained a derivative to me once as a rate of change and I did not need three worked examples afterward. I felt the thing tilt. Years later when I understood that a matrix is a machine that stretches and rotates space, and that eigenvectors are just the directions the machine cannot be bothered to turn, I sat with that for about a week and was insufferable at dinner. Probability made sense to me the first time somebody framed it as bookkeeping for ignorance. I have never had trouble with the ideas. The hate was the exam hall. My marks were a scandal. Not a catastrophe, which would at least have been dramatic. A scan...
