>>10141063I don't think anyone believes in a unified theory of math. Most people do not care about foundations and, really, the formalism is not as bad as you think. As I said, it is just a way to communicate ideas clearly, and if it has to change, it will change, and ideas won't (as you point out here:
>>10141196 ).
also, re:
> most mathematicians don't even try to learn computer science, or physics or psychology, etc. which is pretty doable to learn after the advent of the internet.What if it is not relevant to their research ? I would have to disagree with the mentions of physics and CS; it really depends on the sort of math that you do. People who work in mathematical physics, be it fluid dynamics, statistical physics, or QFT, and even people working in PDE, geometric analysis etc. are generally interested in physics and know a lot about it, though they might not be physicists. Similarly, people who work on the fringe of CS (combinatorics, algorithms, machine learning, language theory, computability, information theory etc.) are generally savvy about theoretical CS.
It's just that there is only so much you can do with the time you have on earth, and all of these fields have developed in such ways that it is difficult to have even general knowledge about them without spending a lot of time learning about them.
If anything, you should complain about the current state of academia, which does not reward expository work, or work on the foundations of subjects, and does not allow people to take breaks to learn about other fields (unless you are already tenured, but that only happens once you are like 40). That makes the (already steep) learning curve even steeper.
