Who listens to scientists? Mostly just other scientists.

Re:Who listens to scientists? Mostly just other scientists. by kragen on Tuesday June 21, 2011 @04:42PM (#2680317)

If you have only an engineering-level math background, the blog will have to explain what a field is, what a cubic field is, and what a discriminant (of a field) is, in every post. And it will have to do it briefly enough that you stay interested, and accurately enough that what follows is meaningful. This sounds to me like an impossible task.

Mathematicians do have the advantage that all their papers are open-access. If you're interested in math, you can cruise on over to arXiv and read 60 abstracts an hour.

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Re:Who listens to scientists? Mostly just other scientists. by pessimizer on Tuesday June 21, 2011 @05:08PM (#2680434)

"[...]the blog will have to explain what a field is, what a cubic field is, and what a discriminant (of a field) is, in every post."

At most once. Links are what the internet is for:)

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Re:Who listens to scientists? Mostly just other scientists. by kragen on Thursday June 23, 2011 @05:30PM (#2689967)

Moving the explanations out of the blog posts into a separate page or pages makes the problem harder, not easier, because it keeps you from omitting parts of the background that aren't necessary to understand the relevance of some particular result.

If you want links, here they are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(mathematics)#Definition_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_field

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discriminant_of_an_algebraic_nu...

The thing is, those articles probably aren't brief enough for many people to stay interested, and they probably also don't go deep enough to make any particular one of impendia's results comprehensible. (And I'm also not sure if they're readable to people with only an engineering background in math.)

(In case you think I'm being snooty about engineers, I dropped out of college and have never published a theorem; instead, I have made my living writing software.)

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Re:Who listens to scientists? Mostly just other scientists. by pessimizer on Friday June 24, 2011 @07:31PM (#2694360)

Many people wouldn't stay interested; I'd say the vast majority wouldn't. But, after explaining those things to the extent that you thought was worthwhile, you ended up with 100 long term readers out of the x billion on the internet, I'd count that as a huge win, myself.

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Re:Who listens to scientists? Mostly just other scientists. by kevinskii on Tuesday June 21, 2011 @05:12PM (#2680445)

If the goal were to make it so the layperson could read and understand the paper itself, then yes, that may well be an impossible task.

But the OP's goal is simply to increase interest in his own work. Recurring concepts could be explained once somewhere and referred back to as needed, and the research and its implications could be elaborated on in far more detail than that given in the abstracts. This should not only be possible, but would likely be quite successful.

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