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I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

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Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#31
post #18
post #11

This does not surprise me in the least. Math was always extremely easy for me growing up. Up through my first differential equations class I found almost everything trivial to learn (the one exception is that I always found proving things difficult). I made the mistake of minoring in math and that slowly killed my enjoyment of it. Once I got to differential geometry and advanced matrix theory it all just became too a…

> (the one exception is that I always found proving things difficult) Proofs are at the heart of math. Everything else is something different.

Not in the American school system, at least. AFAICT grade school "math education" is mostly about lodging a particular calculation algorithm implementation into students' heads and making them repeatedly run it, on a variety of test inputs. A large majority of Americans will never do a single bit of mathematics in their lives, cradle to grave.

To be fair, there are lots of efforts to change it. But (being pretty harsh here) a significant number of math teachers really don't have the ability to understand math themselves, let alone teach it.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#32
post #14

TLDR: The author independently re-discovered what you may know as Old Code Syndrome. I think that's because mathematical papers place too much value on terseness and abstraction over exposition and intuition. This guy's basically in the position of a fairly new developer who's just been asked to do non-trivial update of his own code for the first time. All those clever one-liners he put into his code made him feel sm…

Kind of old code syndrome. I would say it is more like changing from Java to Ruby on Rails full time, and looking at your old Java code which is now a rusty language, with rusty memories of the class libraries and frameworks you used. Even with beautiful code it will be a struggle.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#33

My response is that for every 100 of these types of papers, one of them may prove to be pivotal or inspirational in something truly groundbreaking and functionally useful. For this reason, I am all for 100 different people spending their time doing things like this, because eventually one of them will make an impact that is greater than 100x the efforts of 100 normal men. It's just a different kind of "brick in the w…

I don't necessarily agree with that point of view. Even if a paper brings nothing new to the pot, it might help others to get into a field or a problem. I often find myself reading the introduction and first sections of useless (to me) papers just because they do a really good job at explaining things that are confusing. This last years I've really came to appreciate papers as a learning tool instead of class notes or books.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#34
post #11

This does not surprise me in the least. Math was always extremely easy for me growing up. Up through my first differential equations class I found almost everything trivial to learn (the one exception is that I always found proving things difficult). I made the mistake of minoring in math and that slowly killed my enjoyment of it. Once I got to differential geometry and advanced matrix theory it all just became too a…

During my PhD I found I had to occasionally lock myself in a conference room with a bunch of papers and all the whiteboards to do a sort of "deep dive", in order to get everything into my head and push things forward. Things that were a bit rusty quickly came back after a little bit of effort.

At the end I'd emerge with a bunch of photos of whiteboards with clear intermediate steps, and then I'd write it up as a short report in LaTeX. Of course, as the report turned into a paper, I took out all the useful 'trivial' steps - which always feels a bit wrong. I think it's also useful at this stage to drop everything for a month or two and come back and see if you still understand what you wrote.

I think the "deep dive", putting prolonged effort in, and writing it up are all key aspects.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#35
post #18
post #11

This does not surprise me in the least. Math was always extremely easy for me growing up. Up through my first differential equations class I found almost everything trivial to learn (the one exception is that I always found proving things difficult). I made the mistake of minoring in math and that slowly killed my enjoyment of it. Once I got to differential geometry and advanced matrix theory it all just became too a…

> (the one exception is that I always found proving things difficult) Proofs are at the heart of math. Everything else is something different.

V.I. Arnold:

“Proofs are to mathematics what spelling (or even calligraphy) is to poetry. Mathematical works do consist of proofs, just as poems do consist of characters.”

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#36
post #11

This does not surprise me in the least. Math was always extremely easy for me growing up. Up through my first differential equations class I found almost everything trivial to learn (the one exception is that I always found proving things difficult). I made the mistake of minoring in math and that slowly killed my enjoyment of it. Once I got to differential geometry and advanced matrix theory it all just became too a…

> I think my point is that you can lose competence in math very very quickly through lack of constant exposure.

This is not that important in my opinion. If you're lacking exposure, it must be because you don't apply math every day, and it won't be a big deal. If you apply math every day? Then you will quickly catch up with whatever field you're using.

If you're in pure math, then none of that matters as well, only proofs do. And lack of exposure will often not harm any of the tricks you learned while constructing/understanding them.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#37
post #11

This does not surprise me in the least. Math was always extremely easy for me growing up. Up through my first differential equations class I found almost everything trivial to learn (the one exception is that I always found proving things difficult). I made the mistake of minoring in math and that slowly killed my enjoyment of it. Once I got to differential geometry and advanced matrix theory it all just became too a…

> Up through my first differential equations class I found almost everything trivial to learn

Mankind hasn't yet figured out a good way to teach the first Differential Equations course.

The first serious Calculus course introduces some level of rigor and formalism, but this alone is not sufficient for Diff Eqs. And the DE courses are typically leaning towards applications, so they tend to succumb to the "fiddle these dx's and dy's around like it's magic, in the end it might work out" approach.

The business is well founded, which you will discover later. But no one has figured out how to massage that into the first course.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#38
post #7

Math seems to have a very ephemeral lifetime in the brain. I skipped a year of college once, and when I returned I realized I had to basically abandon any major with a math requirement, because I had seemingly forgotten everything . I'm currently struggling with an online Machine Learning class (the Coursera one... at the tender age of 43), and I can only take it (so far, at least... just failed my first quiz... fort…

> because I had seemingly forgotten everything

graduated in math, let me tell you this is how all my fellow students felt like every semester in every class.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#39
An interesting read. But I think the author should have explicitly written out the point he is really making: you can't be too careful about making your writing clear, even to yourself. I recall reading (I'd point to the book with a link if I could remember in what book I read this) that mathematicians who occasionally write expository articles on mathematics for the general public are often told by their professional colleagues, fellow research mathematicians, "Hey, I really liked your article [name of popular article] and I got a lot out of reading it." The book claimed that if mathematicians made a conscious effort to write understandably to members of the general public, their mathematics research would have more influence on other research mathematicians. That sounds like an important experiment to try for an early-career mathematician.

More generally, in the very excellent book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century,[1] author and researcher Steven Pinker makes the point that the hardest thing for any writer to do is to avoid the "curse of knowledge," assuming that readers know what you know as they read your writing. It's HARD to write about something you know well without skipping lots of steps in reasoning and details of the topic that are unknown to most of your readers. This is one of the best reasons for any writer to submit manuscripts to an editor (or a set of friends, as Paul Graham does) before publishing.

And, yes, if you think what I wrote above is unclear, as I fear it is, please let me know what's confusing about what I wrote. I'd be glad to hear your suggestions of how to make my main point more clear. I'm trying to say that anyone who writes anything has to put extra effort into making his point clear.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00INIYG74/

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#40
> I have attempted to deliver [these lectures] in a spirit that should be recommended to all students embarking on the writing of their PhD theses: imagine that you are explaining your ideas to your former smart, but ignorant, self, at the beginning of your studies!

-Richard Feynman

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