Gregory's ServerA mathematician uses first person plural in proofs to suggest to the reader that they are on a journey together. This is not dissimilar to Virgil guiding Dante through the Inferno.
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 Would kinda prefer Statius guiding us through Purgatory, or better yet Beatrice guiding us through Paradiso.  "I found myself within a forest dark,  @ProfKinyon yeah, remember my “Analysis I” lecturer being like “now, we’d like to proof that…” and I’m like “whoever that we is, it doesn’t include me!”  @mb21 @ProfKinyon Or, "of course I'd like to prove that, but right now I'm tired enough to just take your word for any proposition that sounds plausible". In Analysis I, everything sounds kinda plausible. But I remember reading the original works of Euler and getting surprised how sloppy their proofs at the time often were. "Uniform convergence? Never heard of it."   @ProfKinyon Video game streamers do this and I fucking hate it. Some of them even show a live picture-in-picture of their cat, yet they still haven't figured out what academia has known for ages … @ProfKinyon Did you the know of the Poul Anderson Novel 'Operation Chaos' in which the protagonists are led through a literal non-Euclidean version of hell by the spirits of the mathematicians Bolyai and Lobachevsky?  Huh, I always thought of this usage of "we" being akin to how "you" and "they" can be either singular or plural, while I, he, she, it, and thou are strictly singular.  |
@ProfKinyon
Paradise awaits.