Not a fan of the article. It resorts to ad hominem attacks like
> GA had gotten a bad reputation because of its tendency to attract bad mathematicians and full-on crackpots. Hestenes honestly sounds like one a lot of the time, and I’m not really sure whether he is or isn’t. It makes sense, really.
> GA ended up appealing to a lot of fringes: people who only had undergraduate degrees, people who had dropped out of PhDs, people with PhDs from unrigorous programs, people who had been good at math but were perhaps going a bit senile, random passerbies from engineering or computer programming, run-of-the-mill circle-squarers, people who had a bone to pick with establishment mathematics and felt like all dissenting views were being unfairly suppressed
> It didn’t help that a lot of the texts by the actually-competent GA people, like the Cambridge group, tended to say things that sounded and still sound kind of crackpotty as well.
After reading the article, the main "case against geometric algebra" I could find in there was that the author does not like the people using/doing research in geometric algebra, such as the ostensibly failed academics from a Cambridge research group [1] which the article links to.
I was expecting in the "An Actual Case Against GA" section that the author would demonstrate something like "Geometric Product actually does not work if you apply it to xyz domain". Rather, the section just ended up being mostly about the type of bikeshedding you see about naming of variables in programming.
There is I guess merit to the core "there is no good general interpretation or usage for the geometric product or mixed-grade multivectors" thesis of the article but calling other academics crackpots really subtracts from that message.
I think this is unfair to the article.
Those paragraphs are in the background section, clearly labeled as "this is what other people think", and are followed with a high effort explanation of (presumably) the substance of the theory and why the author considers some of their ideas to be good and others to just increase the confusion.
The technical arguments are less like variable naming discussions and more like arguments against teaching logic circuit design with only nand (without naming the and/or/not operators) or using untyped lamba calculus (with Church numerals, e.g. `3 := λf.λx.f (f (f x))`) to do calculations on numbers.
At the least, the five bolded statements summarizing 5 of the 7 highly technical arguments should count as substantial claims.
Of course, having learned of the subject only from the author, it's hard to know whether it's a good representation of GA or a strawman, but the theory that he teaches as GA indeed seems quite flawed as a tool for thought.
Only tangenially relevant, but the exagerrated differentiation of universities, and levels of education (e.g. PhD vs. not) has always been bothering me. I only have experience in a different field (CS), and yes, those things can be indicators, but I've experienced so many outliers in both directions to know that degrees need to be taken with more than just a grain of salt.
This differentiation is amplified in (pure) mathematics, where two different subfields can have essentially zero overlap*, making peer review and general QA difficult to scale.
* Physical sciences also have a lot of diversity, but at least you can go to their labs and see their equipment, reagents, data, etc cetera.
Yes, this is essentially because mathematics is such an old science and goes very deep into branches. That's btw also why getting a certain degree is much harder there than in any other fields I've seen (did a bunch of courses at university in various fields, and the diff between e.g. pure math and psychology is almost comical).
I meant it more as an assessment of the state of affairs, not as an ad hominem (I have no opinion about the people at all). IMO the crackpottery is impossible to ignore, and if you don't talk about it everyone feels like they're going crazy. It's a very widely-noticed thing that is distinct and bizarre compared to other parts of math.
Crackpot really has connotations like "flat earther" and "aliens built the pyramids". It's one thing to say "I believe GA proponents' claims regarding the usefulness of the geometric product are overstated". It's another to say "GA proponents are crackpots".
Well, I said "sound kind of crackpotty", not "are crackpots", about the reputable writers. My point (ish) is that I would really like it if the non-crackpot GA writers would try a lot harder not to sound like crackpots! It is a real issue. I've never seen writing in any other field of math which so frequently strays into sounding unhinged. (Referring mostly to Hestenes + the Cambridge group here.)
The geometric product is transform composition.
TRANSFORM COMPOSITION!
(sorry, it's not your fault or even his that you didn't know this - GA textbooks should have it as the first thing they teach but they don't)
Is that linear composition or affine?
Can do either! If your multivectors represent linear transformations then their products will also be linear transformations. If they're affine transformations then their products will be affine transformations. Euclidean, conformal, etc!
you might want to read this post by a GA researcher: https://terathon.com/blog/poor-foundations-ga.html
especially the part about duals -- made me feel like I was going crazy when I was trying to figure out degenerate metrics: every source deals with it in a slightly different (often sloppy) way; you're sure it all must be possible to resolve and get something beautiful and consistent, but not while you're trying to apply it to a specific problem you need to solve
It does starts to sound a bit like chortling about what a weird asshole Semmelweis is. ISTR to recall that US students of linguistics were slow to adopt the International Phonetic Alphabet because it North America it had become associated with elocutionists, and no proper academic linguist wanted to look like an elocutionist grubby.
> After reading the article, the main "case against geometric algebra" I could find in there was that the author does not like the people using/doing research in geometric algebra
Mathematics is a social activity. The research cultures of different branches matter.
Which is why articles like this are obnoxious
> I could find in there was that the author does not like the people using/doing research in geometric algebra
The start of the article makes a specific technical claims:
> Hestenes’ Geometric Product is not a very good operation and we should not be rewriting all of geometry in terms of it
Later he explains why:
> there is no good general interpretation or usage for the geometric product or mixed-grade multivectors
How is the geometric product any less motivated than any other notation? Ultimately the value of a notation is how easy it makes it to work and think. I'm not sure if GA achieves that or not, but what's the harm in trying a new approach?
AFAIK nobody is proposing to replace all of geometry with GA, only 3+1 spacetime.
Author doesn't argue against the idea of choosing a new notation, he makes very detailed arguments about why this specific new notation is clumsy to work with.
Yes but my point is that their argument is undermined by the extreme clumsiness of standard mathematical physics notation. I don't believe GA is the best possible notation for physics but it could be a stepping stone. We need more people who explore such things rather than more people who call each other crackpots.
I’m just refuting the claim that the article only focuses on ad hominem arguments.
He's distressingly wrong about this, the geometric product is transform composition
(Apologies to folks who have seen me repeat this a million times; but it's very important folks be aware of it)
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