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Terence Tao's General Exam

math.princeton.edu

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Re: Terence Tao's General Exam

#31

Post by mctavjb9 »

telemachos wrote: post #17
tptacek wrote: post #5

Advice: next time you feel an urge to frustration or mockery of non-computer-professionals, pull this up and start reading it from the top. And this is the general exam.

> And this is the general exam. I agree with your basic point, but if you mean to say that some other set of exams (the non-general ones) were harder, I'm not so sure. For most places, there are two sets of exams: generals before you write a thesis and your thesis defense. In my experience, pre-dissertation general exams are significantly harder than the oral defense of a thesis. Most universities use them as a final…

Definitely my experience. I still have vivid nightmares about the general exam more than 10 years later. It was an 3 day x 8 hours per day written test with no breaks. If you wanted to eat, you had to bring food with you into the test room. Then there was the dreaded oral inquisition. Although I didn't appreciate it at the time, having survived the abject misery of the first 2 years of a physics Ph.D., everything else has seemed manageable in comparison. A few years ago, they changed the format of the written exam to a single 8 hour day. My thesis defense was a total cakewalk. Scheduling it late on a Friday afternoon was probably the single smartest thing I ever did in grad school.

Re: Terence Tao's General Exam

#32

Post by tzs »

robertk wrote: post #28
lamnk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, he is a prodigy. The only person I know that have matched impressive ingenuity is Stephen Wolfram. Great, now after reading their bio, i'm feeling more depressed ... sigh

I hope that was facetious.

What part do you hope was facetious?

Re: Terence Tao's General Exam

#33

Post by ww520 »

lamnk wrote: post #21
bdhe wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A smart fellow indeed. He is one of the few people I know who has an insanely prolific online presence. His blog, What's New ( https://terrytao.wordpress.com/ ) has hundreds of detailed articles on various math topics and occasionally I find myself using it as a beginner's reference to detailed topics. He's also published his blog posts as books. It is astounding how one person can produce so much intellectual output…

Come on, he is a prodigy. The only person I know that have matched impressive ingenuity is Stephen Wolfram. Great, now after reading their bio, i'm feeling more depressed ... sigh

Math is hard. Let's go shopping!

Re: Terence Tao's General Exam

#35

Post by redthrowaway »

acangiano wrote: post #25
tptacek wrote: post #5

Advice: next time you feel an urge to frustration or mockery of non-computer-professionals, pull this up and start reading it from the top. And this is the general exam.

In my experience programmers don't mock mathematicians and other hard science and engineering specialists. They are seen as more or less peers. They tend to mock marketers, MBAs, sociology majors, etc.

"Hard" is a relative term, here. Surely physics is hard science. Most would agree with Chemistry. Biology? Well, okay...Psychology? No, now you're just--Sociology? The hell? How did we get here?

As far as people I mock--only those who think a liberal arts education will land them a good job with no other qualifications. The world needs historians (even of the art variety), anthropologists, sociologists, and even marketers. What it doesn't particularly need, however, is 70% of the college population pursuing those degrees when maybe 3% of the jobs out there are suited to them.

Re: Terence Tao's General Exam

#36

Post by robryan »

jarekr wrote: post #10
tptacek wrote: post #5

Advice: next time you feel an urge to frustration or mockery of non-computer-professionals, pull this up and start reading it from the top. And this is the general exam.

I obviously won't doubt the genius of Terrence Tao, but reading about PhD level research from any other discipline without knowing a yota about it would leave exactly the same impression, even from a lesser scientist. Of course some people are incredibly smart, but there is no need to mythologize their abilities without having any understanding of what they have actually done. Thus I think such an article can only ha…

I think Terrence on his blog does a decent job as coming across as someone who is really smart but has got to that position in maths by spending a lot of time in some pretty narrow fields. He openly admits, like for example when P/NP stuff come up a bit maybe 6 months back, areas where he isn't an expert.

He could probably easily make his knowledge look even more impressive but is humble about what he does and doesn't know.

Re: Terence Tao's General Exam

#38

Post by btilly »

redthrowaway wrote: post #35
acangiano wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience programmers don't mock mathematicians and other hard science and engineering specialists. They are seen as more or less peers. They tend to mock marketers, MBAs, sociology majors, etc.

"Hard" is a relative term, here. Surely physics is hard science. Most would agree with Chemistry. Biology? Well, okay...Psychology? No, now you're just--Sociology? The hell? How did we get here? As far as people I mock--only those who think a liberal arts education will land them a good job with no other qualifications. The world needs historians (even of the art variety), anthropologists, sociologists, and even mark…

Let me justify that categorization for you.

http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-makes-it-science.h...

Re: Terence Tao's General Exam

#39

Post by rfurmani »

rfurmani wrote: post #19

It's not that impressive, he performs okay. I hear he spent the first few years mostly playing games, until he finally buckled down and got a thesis out.

I can understand getting downvoted for tone, but I disagree with the downvoting as I was just trying to state facts. The thought process here seems to be: Terry Tao is a brilliant researcher, therefore why he wrote here must be great. I thought one of the tenets here is that work should stand on it's own value and not on who did it, especially when so young. The typical Princeton student would do better on this, and if you really want to see a good one you can check Bhargava, Venkatesh, etc. I was going to go through this qual and give examples but nearly every paragraph has something bungled. It you have any particular questions, I'd be happy to respond
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