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Mike Dilger | 1 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 I agree with you.  I think topologists suffer from an off-by-one error.  A sphere should be defined as the base topology, otherwise it would have -1 holes in it!
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Aspherical | 1 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Glad we are on the same page. Don’t scold the topologists too much. I am teaching topology regularly. It might be there are a few people around that are a little too anal about their definitions. I was afraid your question will lead into trouble. If you puncture a sphere once it is topologically a plane or an open disc. Are you a mathematician or just fancying a little surface topology?
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Mike Dilger | 1 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 I'm a computer scientist... so yes, a mathematician (computer science is math not science, I don't know how it got so misnamed). I did research on computer vulnerability classifications, so... science actually I guess.
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Aspherical | 1 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Very interesting. I heard certain computer scientists claim that the field is in many respects more like a craft or an art than actual science.  I recently started dabbling with the language Scheme (a concise and intriguing Lisp dialect)  and the MIT school (the wizard book etc ….) it gave me many beautiful insights and ahas about computing concepts ….  And about Scheme’s  theoretical beauty and its  ramifications and influence on more popular programming  languages. I hope to become more proficient and maybe sometime use it as a tool in my research. However as a theoretical mathematician l’art pour l’art is also very satisfying for me.
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Mike Dilger | 1 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 It is a mix.  It is mostly math:  shannon entropy, complexity theory (P vs NP), etc.  But undoubtedly there is a lot of engineering (programming, algorithms).