Hildebrand "Methods of Applied Mathematics" is the most approachable math text I've read. After hearing me express confusion about various topics that my dad thought were straightforward, he gave me his book from when he was in college, and yes, things were suddenly straightforward.

Does anyone know exactly where the ban was published?

I haven't found it under either Courant or Hilbert in either

https://sammlungen.ulb.uni-muenster.de/hd/periodical/pagevie...

or

https://sammlungen.ulb.uni-muenster.de/hd/periodical/titlein...

(Note the font change between 1935 and 1938, clearly showing I was in the wrong on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23446057 My bad!)

I don't have a gripe with the term per se but in this case omitting who did it plainly renders the headline clickbait. If one tiny bit of info added to a headline would lose you most of your clicks, you're being deceptive to gain clicks. In this case the info is that the Nazis banned the book, because no one at all familiar with their book-banning criteria would find it surprising that math books were among the ones they banned, and so would shrug and move on without clicking. The implication of the headline is that the banning is novel or surprising or perhaps especially (and most provocatively) due to its content, but it's not.

Exactly. And a book shouldn't be listed as a "banned book" because one overly-cautious librarian decided they shouldn't have it in a school. You wouldn't call something "illegal" if it were illegal just in one country for a brief period of time. And 'banned' is used as a badge of honor - in this case it really has nothing to do with the book content either.

The law passed the Senate with unanimous consent, it doesn't seem like there are congressmen out of their budget.

Why should we accept rent seeking as inevitable?

In my mind, a couple big reasons.

One, for the same reason that we accept a lot of awful things like murder as inevitable. Of course we'd rather get rid of these things, but it's unrealistic to think we'll get rid of them completely, so the systems we have in place for dealing with them when they happen will always be very important.

Two, because these things are often in the eye of the beholder. What I see as "rent seeking", you might see as "providing a public good". Most people (on HN at least) think current US copyright law represents a lot of rent seeking by Disney. But most of the same people still support some notion of copyright. There's no clear line where "public good that most people agree with" ends and "rent seeking" begins.

Eh? Even if a person would not end up with enough funds to secure re-election if they chose to vote against a measure, does not mean that they don’t have the freedom to vote against it.

They are still responsible for their actions even if the alternative actions would be highly against their self-interest.

Even a person who is threatened with death if they don’t take an action, is still free to either take or not take the action. They might be justified in taking the action on the basis of said threat, even if the action would ordinarily be forbidden, but they are still making a choice.

but would do a lot I think to curb both bribery and extortion

I disagree. If anything it will push them for more bribery and extortion. Wealth seeks wealth and there is never enough wealth.

Disney buys the laws.

Agree.

Of course Disney aims to maximize their value of the IP, also via methods that most don't feel are honest and net good for society.

But that's where law makers should be expected to hold back and take the opinions and interests of others into account too.

Indeed: https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/house-bill/2589

Notably, Sonny Bono for whom, along with the other sponsers I withhold invective purely out of respect of this community and its value of civil discourse.

I find the extension from 50 to 70 years extremely distasteful; manifest contempt by 'artists' for the commons and society's investment in their success.

Eh, isn't this a given in a corporate state?

Congresspeople come and go, but Disney will reign eternal, partly because of lobbied-for legislation like this!

It's weird though, because they are roughly about as effective at lowering Disney's status as they are at voting the politicians out because collective action problems are hard.

https://www.johnfaben.com/blog/gpt-3-translations

Or check section 3.3 in the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf

That's true.

I found a copy of the original German (unfortunately in scanned, DJVU form), but it was somewhat tricky to find. This comment inspired me to upload it to the Internet Archive so that others can access it more easily (https://archive.org/details/methoden-der-mathematischen-erst...).

Thanks for that information. I had not known that was a part of CUSMA.

From reading a Canadian law firm's analysis of the changes (https://www.blakes.com/insights/bulletins/2020/ip-post-nafta...), Canada has 2.5 years (until the end of 2023) to enact this change. This can also be seen in the link you provided in Article 20.89.4.c. (The link I provided mislabels this as Article 20.90. or perhaps refers to an alternate draft of the document.)

It appears that Canada has not enacted this law just yet, although I may be mistaken about that. Depending on when they do, Courant's work may or may not enter the public domain in 2023, although it seems more likely than not that the copyright term will be extended by then.

And volume 2: https://archive.org/details/methodsofmathema0002cour

"promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

The value of their work doesn't end with their death. This means that they can sell the rights prior to dying and receive some of that value.

The citation there [1; pdf] has some additional information.

I'm sure Courant was persecuted for being Jewish (see e.g. the discussion in that same document about how Landau was treated), but it seems to have not been the official reason for his dismissal.

[1] http://irma.math.unistra.fr/~schappa/NSch/Publications_files...

Apparently one thing nazis and german communists could agree upon, both in theory and in practice, during the early thirties was that the social-democratic centrist/moderate alternative to either extreme had to be destroyed.

(I left off reading Weil around this point. I'd get back to it, but find political systems without a healthy number of major parties rather depressing subjects.)

Thanks for finding that detail. I went to that article and missed it somehow.

It’s not as though the Nazis started immediately murdering all Jews (or anyone they deemed Jewish) in 1933.

For example, the Nuremberg Laws (which, among other things, banned marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans) only went into effect in 1935.

Considering the Nazis only were in positions of power for twelve years and still managed to murder six million Jews and many million other people they did not like, they did move quickly and there certainly were sudden shifts and changes in what people (in particular Jews) were allowed to do and subjected to. However, the overall trajectory was still one of turning up the intensity, not going into it with full intensity, among other things certainly also for propaganda reasons.

Given that the Social Democratic Party was the only part voting against the Enabling Act in 1933 (Communist MPs were at that point already all imprisoned, banned from parliament or fleeing) he certainly had, however, two things the Nazis could attack him for, whichever was more convenient.

So makes sense to me that they pushed him out and makes sense to me that he fled as quickly as possible.

The Nazis murdered plenty of Social Democrats. The Nazis obviously murdered plenty of Jews. If someone was Jewish and a Social Democrat the distinction of why the Nazis were persecuting them becomes sort of an academic one. They might name either or both reasons, whichever sounds more convenient.

> He did not lose his position due to being Jewish, as his previous service as a front-line soldier exempted him

That's a bit like saying nobody in the US gets shot by police because they're black, since that's illegal. Anti-semites in Germany didn't suddenly start liking Jews who had rights.

He would absolutely have been persecuted for being Jewish; all Jews in Nazi Germany were at the time, of course. The official reason he lost his job was due to membership of the SDP, though.

For anyone who wants to know more about Courant’s life, the people he crossed paths with (which include some of the great mathematicians of the 20th C), and how NYU came to have the Courant Institute, Constance Reid’s biography is and nice read.

I couldn’t understand the anecdote. What did hilbert think of the space? The author doesn’t say anything!

Initially I suspected that the most likely reason was that the _Deutsche Physik_ babble (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik) somehow had got out of hand, but evidently that wasn’t it.

I read it as him asking if Courant was part of a discriminated class at that time, not as him passing judgement on whether the class should be discriminated against.

If you go through life looking to be offended, guess what? You're going to get offended.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not disagreeing with you, but I'm sure we can all agree nukes in the hands of Nazi Germany would have been an unmitigated disaster.

You think the global supply chain is what prevented outright war between the US and Russia during the cold war?

It's both. MAD gave breathing room for a global supply chain unhindered by another continent-consuming transnational conflict.

While there have been conflicts and violence, and the period of time following the development of nuclear weapons has been too short to say definitively, we've had unprecedented levels of peace since the development of nuclear weapons.

One has to come to the conclusion that it was inevitable. The simplest fission bomb is trivially simple to describe once the physics are known.

Not trivial to make without the resources of a major industrial nation, but the actual simplest mechanism is essentially just sufficiently purifying two lumps of a metal of sufficient size and quickly smashing them together.

You don’t get modern technology, say the transistor, without nuclear inevitability.

It's hard to imagine some country wouldn't have pulled it off. The physics were beginning to be understood (and it's worth remembering: until the first test detonations, the actual power of the weapons was not well understood. Granted, once it was understood, the country that developed them did choose to deploy them on a civilian populace...).

But do remember an unknown number of them were persecuted and probably killed. We don't how better the world would have been if all those lives curtailed made their fullest contribution.

I don't think banning tiktok because it works as spywware for the Chinese government is the same thing..

Well ... the banning is _partly_ in response to border violations by a neighbouring country. They're not dissimilar in spirit to sanctions, economic and otherwise, that a certain empowered country imposes on other less-empowered states.

I'd like to send a shout out to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engine, Borges' Library of Babel, and Mark V. Shaney...

That is absolutely ridiculous. Wow!

Always fun when legislators try and get in the way of reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

Wow. But come to think of it, set theory is subtle stuff compared with 1+1+1 = 1 (unless they're talking about characteristic 2?) or reading the old testament under a non-injective mapping (in particular, the Book of Ruth, a non-identity element, seems to be in their kernel?).

Q. what's an anagram of Banach-Tarski?

I saw that a long time ago, it is hilarious.

Tom Lehrer thought New Math was weird enough that he wrote a song about how to subtract with it. (Verse 2 is in base 8!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6OaYPVueW4

This is nothing compared to Hinduism's varna system(caste system), where the entire society is split in to 4 groups and learning to read and write is banned to the bottom 3 groups. Even the skills of one group is prohibited to be learned by the other.