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I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

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Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#171

Post by ComSubVie »

rjzzleep wrote: post #56
gjulianm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that's because mathematical papers place too much value on terseness and abstraction over exposition and intuition. If it only happened on mathematical papers... It is all over the place, in books, classes, etc. Few professors tell you what are they doing and why; they just throw formulas, theorems and symbols at you. Intuition is not given its necessary importance, first because it's hard to grasp some con…

In Germany you get to your advanced courses for the last two years of High school. I picked Math and Physics. We did a bunch of linear regression(with maple?) i believe. And some manual differential equations. I was one of the best in that class, but when I asked what we need this stuff for the other people in the class looked at me and said the following: "if you ask this question you're in the wrong class" I went o…

I even asked at university (statistics course) regarding to some specific test "what do I need this for", the professor looked at me and said "you'll never need this". I packed my things and left (and finished the course about 3 years later with a different professor).

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#172

Post by Symbiote »

vlunkr wrote: post #82
brachi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can't we just provide a simple real life example first and then go on explaining the details? This. People learn differently, in my case, if I can't get the 'Why' first, I'm not that excited to learn it. I guess making 'simple' real life examples in many cases is hard. I also tend to learn things much better if they came from a real problem/need I have. There was a good discussion about a 'project based univers…

High school math was awful at this in the US. I went through a year of calculus and never knew what the heck it was for.

I think it very much depends on the teacher.

It's not difficult to explain the first few topics on calculus in terms of distance, speed and acceleration. Other examples I remember were washing lines (a catenary), the path traced by a stream train's wheels and rocketry.

My teacher in England always had a real world example, but students with the other teacher didn't.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#173

Post by Domenic_S »

EGreg wrote: post #102
csense wrote: 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…

I am curious, how would you assess the readability of my code: http://github.com/EGreg/Platform I kind of developed that style organically as I went along, in both PHP and JS. I tried to make the output readable as well. I've seen many frameworks output a bunch of gibberish, but with today's bandwidth it's not such a big deal to add a little bit of whitespace and make everything readable. Here's a fairly complex appl…

I can give you some feedback since I tend to write a lot of PHP.

Mostly, code style is about consistency. You can have infinite arguments about whether opening braces should go on the same line as the operator/function, but at the end of the day as long as you stay consistent it doesn't really matter.

Here are some consistency issues I found. Your function declarations put the opening brace on the following line, but flow controls open on the same lines. Ex: https://github.com/EGreg/Platform/blob/master/platform/plugi...

In the same vein, commenting seems inconsistent - this file's docblock opens with /* */ style comments, but then you switch to // style. Ex: https://github.com/EGreg/Platform/blob/master/platform/Q.php...

Further down, you use two styles of if(), one with braces and one without, right next to each other: https://github.com/EGreg/Platform/blob/master/platform/Q.php...

I much prefer 2 space indents to tabs. To me, it's much more readable. I noticed your HTML output is also tabbed, which (arguably) needlessly increases the horizontal width you need to see a page of code, especially with modern deeply-nested structures.

Overall the project looks well thought out, and you may have valid reasons for any/all of the above. Just throwing in my initial reactions as a project outsider.

Also, dunno if you know about PSR, but here it's a good starting point that many people (potential contributors) are familiar with: http://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-2/

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#174

Post by znpy »

refrigerator wrote: post #170
znpy wrote: post #167

It seems to me that most commenters are ignoring the fact that the author is a guy that basically left high level mathematics after completing his phd. So basically he went doing other stuff not functional-analysis-related and his functional-analysis got rusty. It seems quite reasonable to me. Call it old code syndrome, call it "my math got rusty", it seems quite normal to me. Also: according to http://fjmubeen.com/a…

He actually finished the PhD in 2011, but started in 2007. Not sure whether that's a significant enough difference to change the point that you're making though.

You're right.

I still think my point is valid though.

I guess he still has a strong mathematical background, a solid problem solving attitude, but details of the topic of his doctoral thesis are missing.

It's been many years, it isn't strange at all.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#175

Post by vidarh »

tluyben2 wrote: post #13
jedberg wrote: post #3

> Beyond scarcely stretching the boundaries of obscure mathematical knowledge, what tangible difference has a PhD made to my life? The same thing a bachelors degree does for everyone else. You've proven that you can start, stick with, and complete a task that takes multiple years and a complicated set of steps.

Which feels like a 'life is suffering' weirdness. I did it and never needed my diplomas for anything. Maybe I benefited somehow but I was a coder and entrepreneur before that; I had a software company before uni. It was over 20 years ago and in hindsight I find it pretty pointless and a waste of time. Maybe I became a better problem solver on some level but unless you are going into research or are not a self starter…

I went into taking my MSc explicitly to be able to add the letters to my resume - I started not long after the dot-com bubble burst, as a precaution. I don't regret it; I learned some interesting things during my thesis (the rest of it was regurgitating stuff I already knew; but it was distance learning so I didn't have to put in much effort), but similar experience - I don't really use it much. If I'd done it full time, it would have been a tremendous waste of time, though.

But a lot of the reason for this experience for me at least was that I started uni after having spent about 15 years learning to program already, and by the time I picked up again and did my masters, I'd had another 10 years of commercial software development experience.

These things are not really geared for people like us that came to them with a lot of pre-existing knowledge, but at people like my class-mates first time around that had hardly touched a computer before, and that did need a lot of hard work to come out with a good understanding of the problems.

As a hiring manager this is why I rarely care whether someone has a degree or not if they can demonstrate experience. And on the other side of the table, I only took that degree because in the UK there are still sufficiently many employers that have an obsession with degrees regardless of experience...

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#176

Post by vidarh »

Silhouette wrote: post #50
forrestthewoods wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This raises an interesting question. Is the PhD process the best way to acquire those general problem solving skills? Or is there a better way to learn them?

From my experience of both academia and life in general, I'd say traditional tertiary education -- meaning lectures and research work from undergraduate upwards in a university setting -- is actually quite a poor way to learn anything. I'd say the ideal way to develop knowledge, understanding and skill in almost any field is a combination of systematic practice and receiving personalised guidance and training from so…

Both the CS and maths undergrad courses at my uni were structured with voluntary lectures coupled with compulsory group study with 10-15 students led by a post-grad TA for many of the larger courses. I skipped most of the lectures, and focused on the group study, and it was far more rewarding.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#177

Post by ajuc »

ars wrote: post #108
vinceguidry wrote: post #65

Earlier 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 not for how or what, the code does that just fine. Comments are for why . Sometimes the why is obvious, then you don't need a comment. The rest of the time, add that comment. Even if it's something like "Steve in accounting asked me to put this in."

Such comments are best added in commit messages. If you add JIRA task number to each commit it's almost always already there (because in the task there will be your discussion with Steve).

And when you change the line because Tom asked you to change it again - you don't need to remember to remove the comment about Steve.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#178

Post by timwaagh »

wfo wrote: post #141
csense wrote: 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…

It would be really nice if all it took to understand difficult mathematics were some easy programming tricks. The problem with looking at old code is you forget what is going on or what the purpose of different components are. The problem with looking at old mathematics is that it is genuinely very difficult to understand. You work very hard to be an expert in a field and get to a level where you can read a cutting-e…

since when are standard tools of good education 'cute little tricks'? mathematics is hard. mathematicians are some of the smartest people in the world. yet the current tendency to not do these things or not do them enough is a consequence of a certain culture, efficiency constraints and even the near universal use of LaTeX.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#179

Post by madsbuch »

timwaagh wrote: post #178
wfo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be really nice if all it took to understand difficult mathematics were some easy programming tricks. The problem with looking at old code is you forget what is going on or what the purpose of different components are. The problem with looking at old mathematics is that it is genuinely very difficult to understand. You work very hard to be an expert in a field and get to a level where you can read a cutting-e…

since when are standard tools of good education 'cute little tricks'? mathematics is hard. mathematicians are some of the smartest people in the world. yet the current tendency to not do these things or not do them enough is a consequence of a certain culture, efficiency constraints and even the near universal use of LaTeX.

I completely agree on the culture point:

Programming and math _is_ essentially the same (Curry Howard isomorphism) and the problems are indeed equally complex.

The difference is that programming is driven on economical terms, hence agility, flexibility, etc. has been developed.

Mathematics is driven in the university sphere, where mostly intrinsic motivation drives. Not many mathematics professors have the urge to sit down and learn scrum, read manifests of coding practice etc.

The math culture will eventually see itself be forced to go these ways to keep up.

Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation

#180

Post by abricot »

timwaagh wrote: post #178
wfo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be really nice if all it took to understand difficult mathematics were some easy programming tricks. The problem with looking at old code is you forget what is going on or what the purpose of different components are. The problem with looking at old mathematics is that it is genuinely very difficult to understand. You work very hard to be an expert in a field and get to a level where you can read a cutting-e…

since when are standard tools of good education 'cute little tricks'? mathematics is hard. mathematicians are some of the smartest people in the world. yet the current tendency to not do these things or not do them enough is a consequence of a certain culture, efficiency constraints and even the near universal use of LaTeX.

I'm curious, are you saying LaTeX is bad for math?

I'm not doubting you, I'm no mathematician, but my understanding is that it is only positive, as it improves the legibility of the text.

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