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Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made?

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Re: Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made?

#81

Post by cperciva »

gtt wrote: post #44
cperciva wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My publications are at http://www.daemonology.net/papers/ , but this doesn't include the work I did when I was 15 -- that was a novel algorithm for computing polynomial GCDs over algebraic number fields, which I never published due to unresolved loose ends involving high-degree fields (professors encouraged me to publish it anyway -- but I didn't want to published something "unfinished"). It turns out that those "loo…

damn good for 19 years old, but as i see there aren't groundbreaking works i hoped to see. =(

damn good for 19 years old

I'm 27 years old, actually...

there aren't groundbreaking works

Ouch. I'd say that my shared caches side channel attack work was groundbreaking (although Shamir and his graduate students were only a few months behind me). I'd say that my projective algorithm for matching with mismatches is groundbreaking. The sqrt(5) \epsilon error bound on complex floating-point multiplication shouldn't have been groundbreaking, but apparently was -- I've never seen numerical analysts get so excited about a ~30% reduction in an error bound.

Re: Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made?

#82

Post by aswanson »

gtt wrote: post #44
cperciva wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My publications are at http://www.daemonology.net/papers/ , but this doesn't include the work I did when I was 15 -- that was a novel algorithm for computing polynomial GCDs over algebraic number fields, which I never published due to unresolved loose ends involving high-degree fields (professors encouraged me to publish it anyway -- but I didn't want to published something "unfinished"). It turns out that those "loo…

damn good for 19 years old, but as i see there aren't groundbreaking works i hoped to see. =(

But how do you quantify groundbreaking? A lot of research can't be qualified as such until many years later, after a field has built on the foundation laid by the originator.

Re: Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made?

#83

Post by spinor »

selva wrote: post #30

I just read 'A Mathematician's Apology' where Hardy touches on this at one point. If you want to consider someone's opinion on your question (besides cperciva), consider Hardy's (because he was a great mathematican and a brutally honest person). Briefly, Hardy thought the ability to make deep contributions to mathematics erodes after middle age. He cites Euler, Abel, Ramanujan, et al. Hardy mentions Gauss who was old…

What about Hardy's collaborator Littlewood, who continued to do excellent research into a very ripe old age?

Hardy was a depressive, and this may have had an effect.

How many of the great mathematicians used Cocaine or amphetamines--not a silly idea, look at how many students use such drugs--to get early success. Recall that Cocaine was LEGAL in the 19th century. Does this explain their early burnout, and the bipolar depression symptoms ( called repeated nervous breakdowns) of so many of the great mathematicians in the 19th and early 20th century?

Re: Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made?

#84

Post by spinor »

selva wrote: post #30

I just read 'A Mathematician's Apology' where Hardy touches on this at one point. If you want to consider someone's opinion on your question (besides cperciva), consider Hardy's (because he was a great mathematican and a brutally honest person). Briefly, Hardy thought the ability to make deep contributions to mathematics erodes after middle age. He cites Euler, Abel, Ramanujan, et al. Hardy mentions Gauss who was old…

What about Hardy's collaborator Littlewood, who continued to do excellent research into a very ripe old age?

Hardy was a depressive, and this may have had an effect.

How many of the great mathematicians used Cocaine or amphetamines--not a silly idea, look at how many students use such drugs--to get early success. Recall that Cocaine was LEGAL in the 19th century. Does this explain their early burnout, and the bipolar depression symptoms ( called repeated nervous breakdowns) of so many of the great mathematicians in the 19th and early 20th century?

Re: Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made?

#85

Post by spinor »

selva wrote: post #30

I just read 'A Mathematician's Apology' where Hardy touches on this at one point. If you want to consider someone's opinion on your question (besides cperciva), consider Hardy's (because he was a great mathematican and a brutally honest person). Briefly, Hardy thought the ability to make deep contributions to mathematics erodes after middle age. He cites Euler, Abel, Ramanujan, et al. Hardy mentions Gauss who was old…

What about Hardy's collaborator Littlewood, who continued to do excellent research into a very ripe old age?

Hardy was a depressive, and this may have had an effect.

How many of the great mathematicians used Cocaine or amphetamines--not a silly idea, look at how many students use such drugs--to get early success. Recall that Cocaine was LEGAL in the 19th century. Does this explain their early burnout, and the bipolar depression symptoms ( called repeated nervous breakdowns) of so many of the great mathematicians in the 19th and early 20th century?

Re: Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made?

#86

Post by spinor »

What about Hardy's collaborator Littlewood, who continued to do excellent research into a very ripe old age?

Hardy was a depressive, and this may have had an effect.

How many of the great mathematicians used Cocaine or amphetamines--not a silly idea, look at how many students use such drugs--to get early success. Recall that Cocaine was LEGAL in the 19th century. Does this explain their early burnout, and the bipolar depression symptoms ( called repeated nervous breakdowns) of so many of the great mathematicians in the 19th and early 20th century?

Re: Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made?

#87

Post by tigerthink »

cperciva wrote: post #36
yelsgib wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "intelligence?" Can we separate it from society's conception of it? Can we state a computational definition rather than a definition in terms of satisfaction of cultural standards? We undervalue a lot of mental attributes - consistency of thought, sensitivity to subtle differences in concepts, patience, self-reflection, the ability to "go meta" etc. which cannot be detected by the rough and rigid abstract pro…

I am highly turned off by the idea that we can't "become smart" after an early age. I find this notion rather peculiar. Do people get "highly turned off" that they can't "get tall"? I've known for my entire life that I could never become a professional athlete -- I simply don't have the physique. What is it about intelligence which makes people get so much more upset than they get about physical attributes?

Intelligence hits closer to home because intelligence is more fundamental to who you are. Children who want to insult each other rarely say "You're weak!" They're more likely to say "You're stupid!"

Would you rather be a brain without a body or a body without a brain?

For a heartrending story about the role intelligence plays in shaping personality, read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

Re: Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made?

#88

Post by tigerthink »

DaniFong wrote: post #80
rms wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting... any source?

I'm afraid not -- it was just an anecdote circulating around the astro department at Princeton. Feynman was known to have an IQ of 125, and I met a grad student there who admitted to an IQ of around 80 -- a perfectly bright person, to be sure. Again, I don't have the ability to prove these things to you, but I think we should recognize that, occasionally, our methods for measuring intelligence are very very broken.

>Feynman was known to have an IQ of 125

That's still more than 1.5 standard deviations above average. If Feynman's IQ was exactly 125, he would be ahead of "only" 95% of the population.

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