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Undergraduate Math Student Pushes Frontier of Graph Theory

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Undergraduate Math Student Pushes Frontier of Graph Theory

#41

Post by semi-extrinsic »

runawaybottle wrote: post #38
lordnacho wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is perhaps one of my biggest downside surprises about university. Although there were plenty of fun people to hang out with, there were very few people who had a seriousness about getting work done, along with a collaborative instinct. Maybe I was unlucky, but I'd thought that an Oxbridge college would yield a few people who could keep me focussed on the academics. And yes, in another world I would have brought…

Intellectualism hasn’t matured as Barbarism has (still going through refinement). Your gym partner is never going to even attempt to prove to you they are stronger, and you yourself won’t even care if they are (or vice versa). There’s a natural understanding of the physical, and mostly we as a society realize how futile it is to exert physical dominance on one another. So you are stronger, what are you going to do, b…

As a follow-up to this line of thought (which I find insightful): if we were to become mature with regards to intellectualism as you say - do you think we would then go on to the next thing to be competitive about? Or maybe we need that next thing to trigger our maturing, as a consequence of competition switching to another domain?

Or, is it possible that competition about important matters is not an inherently human trait, and we could actually just all switch to deeply caring about who is best at Trackmania or who follows the best football team or whatever?

In some sense a sizeable portion of the human population has already done the latter - perhaps they are actually the enlightened ones?

(I'm assuming that competition is important for humans, since this seems to be a well established fact. The question here is whether the competitiveness needs to be about factors related to your intellect and studies/workplace achievements.)

Re: Undergraduate Math Student Pushes Frontier of Graph Theory

#42

Post by ZephyrBlu »

runawaybottle wrote: post #38
lordnacho wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is perhaps one of my biggest downside surprises about university. Although there were plenty of fun people to hang out with, there were very few people who had a seriousness about getting work done, along with a collaborative instinct. Maybe I was unlucky, but I'd thought that an Oxbridge college would yield a few people who could keep me focussed on the academics. And yes, in another world I would have brought…

Intellectualism hasn’t matured as Barbarism has (still going through refinement). Your gym partner is never going to even attempt to prove to you they are stronger, and you yourself won’t even care if they are (or vice versa). There’s a natural understanding of the physical, and mostly we as a society realize how futile it is to exert physical dominance on one another. So you are stronger, what are you going to do, b…

I've never seen this verbalized before, but it makes a lot of sense.

> I will out smart you, establish dominance, hierarchy, status etc - all of which is systemically quantified via prestige, status, income, life partners (all the stupid shit physical dominance once got us)

This seems like it will be very hard to get rid of compared to physical dominance. Partly because smarts are far less straightforward than physicality, and partly because it would be a systemic change.

Re: Undergraduate Math Student Pushes Frontier of Graph Theory

#43

Post by captain_price7 »

boyobo wrote: post #25
tmsh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don’t get why comments like this are downvoted. But I do suspect this makes Hacker News what it is. Good at surfacing a certain x to y percentile of a certain way of looking at things. It’s not a place to brainstorm or be open minded about new ways of thinking successfully - not very very often. More a place to surface small useful bits of information that people find (a) useful and (b) that people are passion…

This particular comment was probably downvoted because he basically just took the hottest buzzword of the last decade and inserted it with a very weak link to the topic at hand. You could copy and paste this comment to any article about any achievement and it would have the same relevance. It is certainly not a “new way of thinking”. First of all, there is hardly any thought here. Secondly, “understanding deep learni…

You know, some of us work in the field that you call "hottest buzzword of the last decade", we constantly see problems that could have benefited enormously from geniuses like above.

So for people like me at least, it's not a "very weak link to the topic at hand".

Re: Undergraduate Math Student Pushes Frontier of Graph Theory

#44

Post by captain_price7 »

munchbunny wrote: post #17
MaximumYComb wrote: post #6

I was having a discussion recently in another forum where I argued that success at a Math Olympiad is a good indicator of future success. I'm not surprised to see in the slightest he won a gold medal at 16.

That doesn’t seem like a hot take to me. Success at a Math Olympiad (at the international level) is almost certainly a good indicator because you have to be an outlier in both talent and willingness to grind in order to get that far, and that level of achievement is the type of success that snowballs because people respect the achievement.

In computer science world, I've personally noticed there is a dismissive attitude towards programming competitions among many, including some of my teachers. Here, it is a hot take.

I never understood this sentiment though. Competitions like ICPC aren't like silly quizzes, you need to have incredibly good understanding of algorithms and data structures. Now I understand that the breadth required here is of course broader than anything a programmer likely to use in an "average" programming task, but then again you shouldn't compare a ICPC finalist with an average programmer either.

Re: Undergraduate Math Student Pushes Frontier of Graph Theory

#47

Post by AndrewBissell »

This reminds me of a story I heard about Paul Erdos while studying graph theory as an undergrad. He is supposed to have said (not sure if this is confirmed or apocryphal) that if all-powerful aliens ever come to earth and demand that we give them the 5:5 Ramsey number, society should marshal all of its resources in trying to find it. If, on the other hand, they demand the 6:6 Ramsey number, we should attempt (hopeless as it may be) to fight the aliens.

Re: Undergraduate Math Student Pushes Frontier of Graph Theory

#48

Post by temp_imo »

qzw wrote: post #27
jb775 wrote: post #22

Wonder how he'd hold up in a modern programming interview. I'd say 75% chance he'd be thrown an obscure curveball and be completely written off by the hiring company.

Nah, the IMO gold medal on his resume alone puts him into a different category. Unless the hiring company is completely clueless, he’d get special treatment from the start. People like him are not like you and me.

I won a Silver medal (a few points to Gold) at the same IMO as him. Not a citizen of anything good, so maybe it's not relevant.

As an undergrad, I got cold emails from the following companies: Jane Street, Citadel, Two Sigma, and several less known hedge fund/quant stuff.

Those were all for trading/analyst positions. Western companies never reply for software internship applications.

Google mails me every year and as if I want to interview for full-time, but they don't interview me when I apply for internships.

I got an intership offer from a big non-Western company, but I didn't get a work visa.

Re: Undergraduate Math Student Pushes Frontier of Graph Theory

#49

Post by yowlingcat »

runawaybottle wrote: post #38
lordnacho wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is perhaps one of my biggest downside surprises about university. Although there were plenty of fun people to hang out with, there were very few people who had a seriousness about getting work done, along with a collaborative instinct. Maybe I was unlucky, but I'd thought that an Oxbridge college would yield a few people who could keep me focussed on the academics. And yes, in another world I would have brought…

Intellectualism hasn’t matured as Barbarism has (still going through refinement). Your gym partner is never going to even attempt to prove to you they are stronger, and you yourself won’t even care if they are (or vice versa). There’s a natural understanding of the physical, and mostly we as a society realize how futile it is to exert physical dominance on one another. So you are stronger, what are you going to do, b…

> we as a society realize how futile it is to exert physical dominance on one another

A more cynical explanation may say it only disappeared was because we discovered the more /effective/ way to exert dominance on others was mentally, not physically. It wasn't due to any collective enlightenment about the sociological futility of domination -- it was merely a desire to achieve better logistics.

Re: Undergraduate Math Student Pushes Frontier of Graph Theory

#50

Post by temp_imo »

MaximumYComb wrote: post #6

I was having a discussion recently in another forum where I argued that success at a Math Olympiad is a good indicator of future success. I'm not surprised to see in the slightest he won a gold medal at 16.

The math olympiad success underestimates him. I would say that in terms of mathematical abilities, Gold on the IMO tenure at a top-100 university.

Aswhin will maybe be a Fields medal candidate.

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