Tuesday, April 08, 2014

[rncphvzz] And why is it interesting?

Entries in an encyclopedia should answer both "what is it?" and "why is it interesting?".  I suspect not enough attention is paid to the second question.

A valid answer to the second question is, "no reason why this is interesting has been discovered yet, but the fact is presented in hopes it may be interesting to some future researcher".

Interestingness does have a subjective quality to it.  Can it be made more objective?  Ideas like "rare" or "unexpected" or "connection to some other fact".

Inspired by difficult-to-understand mathematics articles on Wikipedia which seem to concentrate only on "what is it?".

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