Foundation

I've recently come to what should have been a pretty obvious realization. I guess I've known it for some time, but prepping for the Q has brought it more into focus.

Important results get named. Not necessarily after the person who derived or invented them, but named just the same. Minor results just get listed in texts as Theorem 4.3.2 or something like that. Major results may still be listed that way, but then there will be a parenthetic attribution like (Bayes' Rule). I hadn't given much thought to this until I started looking things up on the web. Since a web page discussing some technicality can't waste space deriving all the necessary supporting results, they have to be able to say "By Bayes' Rule, it follows that ..." and so on. This, of course, is not new to the web, academic papers have been doing the same thing for centuries. I just haven't read too many of those in the past 25 years.

Anyway, my point is that it's a great way to quickly go through a text and find all the important results. So, that's what I'm going to do. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to catalog every named result in all the texts I'm studying from. By completely committing those to memory, I'll not only have the foundational results I need for proving results on the Q, I'll also be in a much better spot for discussing thesis points with other faculty.

And, by the way, Bayes' Rule: P(X|Y) = P(Y|X)P(X)/P(Y). I knew that one already.