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To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

quantamagazine.org

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Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#191

Post by sametmax »

gowld wrote: post #164
RandomInteger4 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe people good at math are actually great at people skills and you're just repeating a bias spread by a banality driven media.

Or maybe sametmax has met dozens of mathematicians and made an informed summary.

To be fair, I had a strange life. I changed school 11 times, and rebuilt my social circle every time. My father also worked for an airline company, so I traveled the world most of my life.

Because I was a geek, I was mostly surrounded by geeks. It gave me a huge and diverse sample to observe. Granted, it's not something you can consider scientific, since I'm the common ground and so the bias in all those observations.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#192

Post by sametmax »

ianai wrote: post #153
RandomInteger4 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe people good at math are actually great at people skills and you're just repeating a bias spread by a banality driven media.

In my experience, people are all equally bad at math. There are just people who have spent longer with the problem(s)/domain(s) and have developed a skill set around it. They start from the same beginnings, though. If you take them out of their usual 'watering hole' they go straight back to beginner status (and of course the degree of it varies by how far it is from their usual routine).

Yes, but some personality traits will make you more apt and willing to keep working on it.

There is a limit in the skills you can acquire. If you spend time and energy on flirting, learning to dress up, building social network, you will have less time to learn maths.

Because of course you'll have sport, music, games, books, movies, family and other study topics taking time as well.

Now maths incline kids, given the choice, will usually choose working on math than going to 10 groups of people to chit chat about superficial topics just to stay in the network.

Nothing wrong about it, just an observation.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#193

Post by sametmax »

ianai wrote: post #184
tinalumfoil wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the suggestion of a "personality requisite to study math" supports the articles thesis.

in today's culture

While it's true the current culture is particularly hostile to math incline people, I must also say that, by nature, people good at solving problem with perfect solutions are not good at integrating in an imperfect society.

They bear part of the responsibility.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#194

Post by doejon »

Balgair wrote: post #92
110011 wrote: post #63

As a counterpoint to the overly exuberant article let me chime in as a graduating theoretical computer scientist. Math is hard and despite its beauty and allure academic life doesn't take place in a vacuum- ergo there's a lot of politics and pettiness from your peers. You should expect to invest years of your life into making progress on some hard problem with little encouragement in the meantime, this takes a tremen…

Chiming in from Bio: Yep, this is true here too. I can't find the citations right now, but there was a recent study done through Elsiver's website. The group got a hold of the servers for Elsiver and took a look at page views. They wanted to know what the rates of papers being read was. It was... disheartening. They found that ~46% (again, not sure here as I can't find the source) of papers will never be looked at ou…

Is there a way ppl is reading papers using sci-hub nowadays instead of accessing the official pages (especially students I'd assume)? :)

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#195

Post by fuck_google »

jayajay wrote: post #168
Balgair wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chiming in from Bio: Yep, this is true here too. I can't find the citations right now, but there was a recent study done through Elsiver's website. The group got a hold of the servers for Elsiver and took a look at page views. They wanted to know what the rates of papers being read was. It was... disheartening. They found that ~46% (again, not sure here as I can't find the source) of papers will never be looked at ou…

> "lecturing the void" This seems, at first, to be a problem in academia, but, at further glance, is really a problem with education.

In my experience at least 90 % of documentation produced in any organization is just archived without practically anyone other than the authors reading it. Even expensive reports produced by external consultants seem to be used mainly to validate that the work has been done and discarded quickly thereafter.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#196

Post by unixhero »

110011 wrote: post #63

As a counterpoint to the overly exuberant article let me chime in as a graduating theoretical computer scientist. Math is hard and despite its beauty and allure academic life doesn't take place in a vacuum- ergo there's a lot of politics and pettiness from your peers. You should expect to invest years of your life into making progress on some hard problem with little encouragement in the meantime, this takes a tremen…

Maybe I skimmed the article, but my takeaway from this article was that using our abilities to think and solve mathematical problems helps us to live a life of more intellectual resilience.

In my view, this wasn't about doing mathematics as an academic career, climbing up the ivory tower, publish or perish, and all that.

Edit: I tend to agree. My intellectual capacity was far improved only after doing first year Engineering Maths & Physics. I did terrible gradewise, but it has helped me visualize, juxtapose mental structures, quickly iterate on different concepts etc.

I should go back to doing something again. Had to do some cartesian products in a data migration the other day, in my dayjob, it was refreshing :).

And as always, this timeless quote from Einstein motivates "Do not worry too much about your difficulties in mathematics, I can assure you that mine are still greater."

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#197

Post by danbruc »

apocalypstyx wrote: post #100
ThomPete wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concepts you deal with in philosophy are vague, the challenge is to provide very precise analysis of these vague (fuzzy?) concepts. But yeah I don't think one is better than the other. Each provide value. I would actually claim that to live your best life, be an engineer. They seem to me at least to be living in that sweet-spot between the abstract, creative and the concrete.

Along with a increased chance of being a creationist and/or jihadist. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2007/11/11/the-salem-hypothesis-... http://www.theness.com/index.php/creationists-mechanical-eng...

This has a 99% probability of being absolute nonsense. Looks more like 30 years of anecdotal evidence and hearsay. Try find a credible source with actual numbers.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#198

Post by isolli »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #159
wbl wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In math we have lots of journals devoted to recreational and more elementary problems. There is a lot of low hanging fruit out there. For instance, compute the fibbonacci numbers modulo the square of a prime and compare to modulo a prime. Are there numbers where the first zero appears at the same point? We don't know. I'm not saying the problem is easy. I'm saying one can make some progress without much theory.

I disagree. Look at 'simple' problems like Fermat's last theorem. It took mathematics much beyond what was known at the time to get anywhere close to a solution.

And much beyond what 99.9% of people will ever hear about in their lifetime.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#199

Post by dagw »

Melchizedek wrote: post #189
dagw wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is no world where whoever just wants to study math can just go study whatever they want for as long as they want, regardless of how well they do it. Certainly in Sweden, once you're in, you're basically free to hang around at University and study for as long as you want. It's not like they're going to kick you off campus.

Yes, but you can only get student subsidies/loans for a couple of years.

Sure, but if you live in cheap student housing and keep other expenses modest, you can probably manage to get by with working part time

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#200

Post by sametmax »

ekm2 wrote: post #136
sametmax wrote: post #104

The problem with this theory, is that it completely ignores that a lot of people good at math have poor people skills. And you need people to be happy and improve your life opportunities. So yeah, math is beautiful, and if you like it, go for it. But if you look for a skill to acquire or practice, your taste no withstanding, this may not be the best investment. Sport, social skills, languages, time management, self i…

>a lot of people good at math have poor people skills All the more reason to open the floodgates so we can get the few people with both skillsets.

You won't achieve that by encouraging people at doing math, it's not attractive enough. Just like it's hard to sell vegetable to somebody eating chocolate. And I LOOOOVE vegetables.

You can, however, achieve this by encouraging nerds to get people skills. Double benefit :

- they will have an easier life

- nerds will be less stigmatized, linked topics will so be more appealing and math more successful

I agree though that putting more kids in contact with math sooner will help a lot. A lot of kids like maths if it's shown to them with passion before they are exposed to the social stereotype or nerdiness.

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