[currymj]

If you read his last two novels he was clearly well-informed about mathematics.

However I have to assume that McCarthy didn't actually master all the material in the math books mentioned here, I think the reporter may be a little too credulous about that. I suspect he had the very common experience of buying a yellow book and being defeated in the first couple chapters.

[scarmig]

That might be an understatement of his capabilities, though obviously he wasn't a professional mathematician. It's a joy to read some of the eulogies professors at the Santa Fe Institute gave to him:

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/memoriam-cormac-mcc...

> He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world and a memory to match. Topics ranged from salvage diving — something we discussed a few days ago — to far more academic fare often focused on mathematics and physics.

> Cormac and I engaged on a wide range of topics. Some recurring themes included social mobility, machine intelligence, the intersection of genius and madness, and cars and trucks.

> Cormac also often remarked that a lively conversation with friends is about as good as sex. He’d talk for hours about physics, math, novels, philosophy, human nature, bawdy humor, corny humor, architecture (including detailed advice on my own house), gambling, history, and any question that lacked a quick and obvious answer.

Etc.

[cols]

Thanks very much for posting this link. The eulogies were indeed a pleasure to read. Choked up a few times.

[noosphr]

> His books, many of which are annotated with margin comments,

I'm not saying that he did, but this along with being the right age to have read How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler strongly suggest that he used that book to grasp a lot more of his books than most people can.

That book gives you a very good strategy for reading books that are beyond you normally. In the three years since I've read it I've managed to finish books that I couldn't read even when I was doing my PhD and it was my full time job to understand them.

The funny thing is that I only ran into that book when I was trying to figure out how to build knowledge graphs for complex documents using LLMs. Using multiple readings to create a summary of each chunk, then a graph of the connections between the chunks, then a glossary of all the terms and finally a critique of each chunk gave better than sota results for the documents I was working on.

[chompychop]

Where can I read more about your research? Knowledge graphs interest me.

[noosphr]

Drop me a line on my profiles email.

I'm playing around with using hyperlinks in pdfs to get around how much the www sucks for posting serious research with serious working code.

Caveat emptor: I'm first working on getting the basic groundwork out, like a pipeline that shows what you need to do to extract a scanned pdf in a quality that tesseract can actually get text out of.

[cxr]

> I'm first working on getting the basic groundwork out, like a pipeline that shows what you need to do to extract a scanned pdf in a quality that tesseract can actually get text out of.

Sounds like TBL's contribution doesn't suck so much after all.

[posterguy]

I'm curious why you think that "strongly suggests" anything?

[voidhorse]

> However I have to assume that McCarthy didn't actually master all the material in the math books mentioned here

Why? And what exactly would mastery look like? Regardless, McCarthy didn't make his mark as a mathematician so his private ability to understand doesn't matter. Why take the opportunity to make a negative assumption and diminish the possibility that he had mastered an understanding in his private life? What does this accomplish? Seems like the only thing it could possibly do is to try and make you and me feel better about our own inadequacies, without proof.

[currymj]

I don't think it diminishes him.

"Stella Maris" is a great novel that could only be written by someone who was very knowledgeable about math. As far as art that engages deeply with math and science, I don't know of anything comparable. Most artists would focus only on the human drama of discovery, without being able to engage with the subject matter.

However, I would consider "mastery" of a math textbook to be you have worked through almost all the chapters, can do a reasonable chunk of the exercises, and could TA the course without too much trouble.

While I don't know for sure, I doubt McCarthy achieved that level of understanding for all the yellow books he owned. I think buying a math textbook on an interesting topic and then not making it very far is a very common and human experience.

[da-bacon]

Agree that “Stella Maris” is amazing for this deep engagement with art. Perhaps in a similar vein I do think there are a couple of other books that do this . One is Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which is similar in that foundations of math makes an appearance. The other is “The Weyl Conjectures” by Karen Olson, which captures what it’s like to really do mathematics. Highly recommend both.