How many people have read this and understand it?
How much money was spent on the production of this disseration?
I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
111–120 of 281 posts
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
General skill of problem solving seems to stick with you forever. It's probably because most of your problem solving knowledge is your own invention. Whereas math and programming is your own invention if you solve all the problems by yourself, if you code everything from the start. This gives you the understanding of the problems, and the reasoning/tools to solve it. I've been dropping in and out of problem solving f…
Reminds me of the quote "What I cannot create, I do not understand." by Feynman.
Giambattista Vico.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see comments helping me... I don't know why people say this type of thing, as if there's some choice you have to make between good names and comments. You can have both, and there are absolutely times when comments are necessary . Too many comments may be a "smell", but code that doesn't require any comments at all is very unlikely.
> there are absolutely times when comments are necessary . I'll have to take your word for it, because I've yet to run into that situation.
/* Yes, this is wrong. The output goes in the db and needs to match /path/to/code/in/other/system.ext */
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#114TLDR: 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…
And a lot of it comes from trying to sound smart instead of readable. Sorry, but if I was this guy's advisor, I'd keep his ass in school until he took away his pretentious "it is obvious from ___ that"'s. Ph. D education just isn't what it used to be.
Mathematics papers (dissertations included) are meant for active researchers. Perhaps that implication really is obvious to an active researcher in the field. The fact that it is not obvious to someone outside of its intended audience is not a mark against the paper. If I said to someone in machine learning that by assuming zero-mean Gaussian priors for the coefficients, we are encouraging small values of the coefficients, that would be really really obvious to someone in ML/stats/data science (I've restated a really basic statistical learning concept), but not to a random educated person.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there are absolutely times when comments are necessary . I'll have to take your word for it, because I've yet to run into that situation.
Comments are incredibly useful for that bit of code that you spent hours trying to make it work and you couldn't figure out a way to name things well or to improve it. That's where a comment is priceless.
The downside of course is that comments aren't compiled/run - so they often become out of date. "Often" might actually be an understatement.
I can't tell you how many times I've been reading a comment that runs quite contrary to what the code really does. You then end up reading the code to reason about it anyway, paying two taxes. After too many of those experiences, you just end up going straight to the code as the source of ground-truth.
This all depends on the readability of the code / and how soon these comments get out of sync. Maybe my experience is atypical, but I doubt it.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#116TLDR: 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…
The one thing that has always bugged me about lots (most?) open source software is the almost total lack of comments. I consider that bad programming. I have projects dating back 15 years in both FPGA's and software that I've had to go back into and maintain or borrow from. Comments, for me, has always been part and parcel of code writing.
I sort of have a conversation with myself as I document code where I tell myself why something needs to be done and, if necessary, how. As a result of this anyone can go into my code for any project at any time and find their way around. In fact, they don't even have to be domain experts to understand domain-specific code because I often take the time to document such thing pretending I am just learning about it (to a point).
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#117The author almost realized the much more important conclusion of the fact he lived. He shouldn't conclude the article by asking "what is the purpose of studying maths?" and then giving an three stupid answers. He should have asked: is this actually "knowledge" as they say academia brings to society? Is the money researchers earn being well spent? Did I actually deserve to be remunerated by this piece of work no one u…
Considering that PhDs get paid next to nothing, I actually think they're getting paid pretty adequately.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#118Math is the shadow universe of physics. Most theorems may not look like they are useful for anything real world till someone is able to peg all the variables to real world. And then as if by magic we realize we already know how how the real world behaves. Till someone does this pegging, the theorems sit idle waiting for problems to solve. I believe this is actually a good thing. We are letting people find solutions before someone finds problems to use them for.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#119[deleted]
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#120This 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)
Same here and I have developed a kind of a complex around it. I used to spend hours practicing proofs just so nobody comes to know that I'm terrible at them. I used to find numerical proofs to problems that had simple general proofs.
However, looking at the other replies it seems we both haven't the faintest idea what Math is ;)