One day I'll retire and go back to school. The idea of learning Math - really learning & understanding Math - as a fun pastime is so appealing. What's stopping me now? That sweet overpaid SDE salary and the endless obligations that come from being an adult. I suspect I am not alone...
There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)
11–20 of 95 posts
Re: There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)
#12One day I'll retire and go back to school. The idea of learning Math - really learning & understanding Math - as a fun pastime is so appealing. What's stopping me now? That sweet overpaid SDE salary and the endless obligations that come from being an adult. I suspect I am not alone...
keep the salary. if the goal it to change the world, to understand reality, to have an impactful life, have a good standard of living, etc. math is one of the hardest ways of achieving that. It's such a saturated field. Almost everything you can imagine has been done to the highest possible degree of abstraction. Every stone overturned except for things which may take a lifetime to even try to understand. Writing a b…
There are big and hairy problems that are bad investments for a young mathematician. I would steer students clear of the Collatz conjecture. But once you get up to speed in your research area, you usually find interesting problems thick on the ground.
Tenure-track positions are competitive, but I don't think there are a lack of interesting things to work on.
Re: There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)
#13One day I'll retire and go back to school. The idea of learning Math - really learning & understanding Math - as a fun pastime is so appealing. What's stopping me now? That sweet overpaid SDE salary and the endless obligations that come from being an adult. I suspect I am not alone...
One of my biggest regrets is not having studied (more) math. But would I regret not studying CS had I studied math? You really can't win :/
Re: There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)
#14One day I'll retire and go back to school. The idea of learning Math - really learning & understanding Math - as a fun pastime is so appealing. What's stopping me now? That sweet overpaid SDE salary and the endless obligations that come from being an adult. I suspect I am not alone...
I'm still grumpy that I accepted I knew what real numbers were just because I could recite back the definition given by the teacher. There is so much depth there if you go looking...
To most people, it just means that when you take the absolute value of a negative number it becomes positive, and the absolute value of a positive number stays positive.
Now there is more to it, but how you might think of absolute value instead is as a distance function, particularly how far away from zero you are on a number line.
This is way over simplified, but an example of how there can be a little more buried beneath the surface.
Re: There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)
#15One day I'll retire and go back to school. The idea of learning Math - really learning & understanding Math - as a fun pastime is so appealing. What's stopping me now? That sweet overpaid SDE salary and the endless obligations that come from being an adult. I suspect I am not alone...
The Open University has an AI master that I'm thinking about right now. It has about 25% of the math that I want to learn, so that would be a good start. I did some prep work (an official high school math certificate) last few months and I noticed that I need a schedule to keep me going.
One thing that I'm quite certain about, is that doing math is the most important thing. And doing math leads to more doing math.
Re: There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)
#16One day I'll retire and go back to school. The idea of learning Math - really learning & understanding Math - as a fun pastime is so appealing. What's stopping me now? That sweet overpaid SDE salary and the endless obligations that come from being an adult. I suspect I am not alone...
keep the salary. if the goal it to change the world, to understand reality, to have an impactful life, have a good standard of living, etc. math is one of the hardest ways of achieving that. It's such a saturated field. Almost everything you can imagine has been done to the highest possible degree of abstraction. Every stone overturned except for things which may take a lifetime to even try to understand. Writing a b…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon
(apart from saying that the evil demon is a future type computer)
Re: There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)
#17One day I'll retire and go back to school. The idea of learning Math - really learning & understanding Math - as a fun pastime is so appealing. What's stopping me now? That sweet overpaid SDE salary and the endless obligations that come from being an adult. I suspect I am not alone...
Actually quite doable as long as one can grit through the Math, some of which do not need a back to back read.
Re: There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)
#18One day I'll retire and go back to school. The idea of learning Math - really learning & understanding Math - as a fun pastime is so appealing. What's stopping me now? That sweet overpaid SDE salary and the endless obligations that come from being an adult. I suspect I am not alone...
keep the salary. if the goal it to change the world, to understand reality, to have an impactful life, have a good standard of living, etc. math is one of the hardest ways of achieving that. It's such a saturated field. Almost everything you can imagine has been done to the highest possible degree of abstraction. Every stone overturned except for things which may take a lifetime to even try to understand. Writing a b…