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Disclaimer: this question is more about philosophy of mathematics than technical mathematics.

Mathematicians always need to choose what to focus their work on. Many pure mathematicians like to say that they're not motivated by a problem's real-life applications, but rather by its beauty/interestingness/etc. I'm trying to build an understanding of how this "beauty" is determined. Let's assume we're talking about research level mathematics and grad students/professional mathematicians.

Clearly some of this "beauty" is subjective since mathematicians have different aesthetic preferences. However, there seems to be at least some objectivity:

  • An overwhelming majority of mathematicians would find the following theorem uninteresting: <a fixed-and-otherwise-unremarkable boolean circuit> is unsatisfiable.
  • Most mathematicians find Fermat's Last Theorem at least somewhat interesting.

Plus, people's interests in math subjects seem (anecdotally to me) to form clusters:

  • Combinatorics and computer science are "close", in a sense that mathematicians who like combinatorics are more likely to like computer science
  • Analysis and algebra are "distant", in that mathematicians who like the algebra-clustered subjects often dislike the analysis-clustered subjects
  • Areas like combinatorics, logic and (higher) category theory seem to be quite polarizing -- more mathematicians have strong feelings about them, both negative and positive, compared to areas like stochastic calculus or algebraic topology.

I'm looking for philosophy / sociology references that investigate this question, both

  • Empirically: surveying mathematicians to discover patterns in their "interestingness" rankings
  • Philosophically: what makes a mathematical problem interesting? In the flavor of something like:
    • Problems for which we have complete algorithms are uninteresting, e.g. elementary plane geometry
    • Problems which connect two previously separate clusters of mathematics are interesting, e.g. Langlands program
    • Theorems about ad-hoc specific cases are less interesting than theorems about a whole class of objects
    • Theorems that derive complex structure from simple axioms are interesting

Thanks!

Peter
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nonagon
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  • I don’t know if it fits on this Stack but I find this question interesting. – FShrike Aug 24 '22 at 21:15
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    I think this is all likely to be very subjective. Fermat, for instance, is just one of a (seemingly endless) list of hard Diophantine problems. I don't know that it's especially interesting because of its nature. Of course it became interesting in the same way that scaling Mt. Everest became interesting....it was obviously very hard and brilliant mathematicians had fallen to their deaths trying (metaphorically, at least). – lulu Aug 24 '22 at 21:38
  • Goldbach is interesting because it is incredibly easy to state but incredibly hard to attack. Twin primes as well. One imagines that a proof of either would require fascinating new techniques, but that's just a hope. It's hardly an objective reason for interest. – lulu Aug 24 '22 at 21:40
  • The question asks for references considering these issues. Which references do so is objective; only their conclusions are at risk of being subjective. – J.G. Aug 24 '22 at 21:42
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    In case it's of interest, this question overlaps a little with this one, insofar as being interesting hinges on being in the pure sweet spot between applied & recreational. – J.G. Aug 24 '22 at 21:45
  • @lulu Yup! “Easy to state, hard to prove” is definitely one answer. “Scaling Mt. Everest” is another. But there are many such possible justifications, imo the only “correct” answer is empirically asking working mathematicians, and trying to backderive from their preferences! Maybe we’d see that the principal component explaining this is “your supervisor’s area of interest”. Maybe it correlates with your big 5 personality traits. Maybe it doesn’t correlate to your personality traits. I’m just curious which of these has been checked. – nonagon Aug 24 '22 at 21:49
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    One interesting path might be to look at questions which are serious but somehow deemed "not interesting". Classification of Finite Simple Groups was obviously "interesting" but Classification of Finite Perfect Groups isn't, though I'd have said that was the inevitable next step. Why? Well, I suppose because the Simple Group part was so incredibly brutal that nobody has the stomach for round $2$. – lulu Aug 24 '22 at 21:54
  • @nonagon That's a really good way to put it. A similar example: the PhilPapers survey quantifies philosophers' opinions, not to see which views are popular, but to perform a factor analysis. – J.G. Aug 24 '22 at 21:54
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    @FShrike: I find this question interesting --- As I began reading I expected something in which the issues were a bit trite (e.g. "beauty" is subjective), but as I continued reading I changed my mind, especially with the identification of "clusters", where I'm sure some will disagree with the examples chosen but my experience has been that there is a fair amount of truth with the examples chosen. nonagon -- I assume you know of books such as The Mathematical Experience by Davis/Hersh, Loving + Hating Mathematics by Hersh/John-Steiner, How Mathematicians Think by Byers, etc.? – Dave L. Renfro Aug 24 '22 at 21:57
  • @FShrike: The second part, where I mentioned some books, was intended for nonagon. I began with "nonagon -- I assume ...", but maybe you missed "nonagon" here. – Dave L. Renfro Aug 24 '22 at 22:03
  • @DaveL.Renfro Whoops, I did indeed. – FShrike Aug 24 '22 at 22:07
  • I would say "interestingness" is akin to "beauty" in that it is not possible to pin down exactly what makes something interesting. The common platitude "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" I think is false, as it misses the fact that there are a great many things which most people consider beautiful. When we describe something as "beautiful" we do mean something (about that thing itself, not our perception of it) even if we can't articulate what in precise terms. Same goes for "interesting" - it's what you intuitively understand it to be, even if you can't define that precisely. – Dark Malthorp Sep 24 '22 at 17:13
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    This post may be subjective, so an opinion – Тyma Gaidash Sep 24 '22 at 17:24
  • "Interesting" and "beauty" are of course subjective , even if many people agree in a particular case. I want to add the Collatz conjecture as an incredible difficult and easy to formulate conjecture that has nothing to do with prime numbers. Interesting in this case is that if Collatz is false there is not necessarily a proof that it is false , contrary to the Goldbach conjecture. – Peter Nov 30 '22 at 10:44

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