He's referencing "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" by the physicist Eugene Wigner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...).

> In the paper, Wigner observed that the mathematical structure of a physical theory often points the way to further advances in that theory and even to empirical predictions.

I think it's a good analogy since it applies exactly how Wigner meant it except in this case it is a branch of mathematics being applied to mathematics instead of physics. Representation theory has been "unreasonably useful and effective" which is what the original article was about.

Hi, I'm a woman. We still exist in tech spaces. Please use "they" when you don't know somebody's gender, or "she" for me now that you know. Thanks

In Frederik Pohl’s The years of the city, gendered pronouns are completely gone. Instead of he or she, there is “e”. His/her is “er”, and him/her is “um”. Too bad it didn’t catch on.

I don't care if you remember me. Remember this.

> Please use "they" when you don't know somebody's gender

We collectively accepted that titles are supposed to be memetic though.

For instance readability is second to shortness. Accuracy is lower priority to impact. Our whole history with titles points to short and punchy catch copies.

Purely descriptive titles only work when the reader will read the paper anyway (e.g. peer reviewing), which is far from the setting we have on HN.