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No country for mediocre mathematicians

garvvee.substack.com

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Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians

#71

Post by dhosek »

arjie wrote: post #65

Really enjoyable read. I escaped a career in Mathematics by being sufficiently bad at it that I only have a Masters. Fortunately, I escaped to a field immune to AI: CS and then a software engineering career. Well, not really, but I did get a good 15 years out of it so thank god for that. About half of my friends are founders of various startups and the rest are executives of and almost all of them have the view that…

Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be about three years out. I honestly don’t know how to guide my 12-year-old son who loves math¹ and coding.

⸻

1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rational number without any guidance at all.²

2. I want to see how close to the general solution he’s gotten on his own, but given that he’s not had any formal algebra, it’s damned impressive and bodes well for his future development.

Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians

#72

Post by uptodatenews »

dhosek wrote: post #71
arjie wrote: post #65

Really enjoyable read. I escaped a career in Mathematics by being sufficiently bad at it that I only have a Masters. Fortunately, I escaped to a field immune to AI: CS and then a software engineering career. Well, not really, but I did get a good 15 years out of it so thank god for that. About half of my friends are founders of various startups and the rest are executives of and almost all of them have the view that…

Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be about three years out. I honestly don’t know how to guide my 12-year-old son who loves math¹ and coding. ⸻ 1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rat…

Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done

https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/

Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"

Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians

#73

Post by cheesecakegood »

emil-lp wrote: post #42

> Lying is a core part of communicating mathematics. We lie to kindergarteners when explaining fractions. We lie to fourth graders when approaching limits... Hard disagree. Lying is with intention to deceive. Teaching is simplifying with the intention that they understand and get the correct intuition. Math is not about lying, that's just silly.

Now chemistry on the other hand…

OK there’s still no intent to deceive but almost all of the “rules” you learn have giant exceptions

Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians

#74

Post by uptodatenews »

underlipton wrote: post #49

That was long-winded, but I appreciate that it seems to have actually been written by a human being. For every landmark theory, theorem, or conjecture, there have been incremental, partial results supporting intuition and inching towards the white whale. When I attended BARD, a small computational number theory conference, one of the organizers preached of the outsized impact we could have just by being willing to pr…

Yeah this just means 1000x more people can become phds if theyre willing

Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians

#75

Post by ACCount37 »

uptodatenews wrote: post #72
dhosek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be about three years out. I honestly don’t know how to guide my 12-year-old son who loves math¹ and coding. ⸻ 1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rat…

Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/ Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"

[flagged]

Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians

#76

Post by genxy »

arjie wrote: post #65

Really enjoyable read. I escaped a career in Mathematics by being sufficiently bad at it that I only have a Masters. Fortunately, I escaped to a field immune to AI: CS and then a software engineering career. Well, not really, but I did get a good 15 years out of it so thank god for that. About half of my friends are founders of various startups and the rest are executives of and almost all of them have the view that…

grey failure is the worst, not dead, not alive and no clear signal.

Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians

#77

Post by fn-mote »

p1esk wrote: post #62
paulpauper wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A PhD in Arithmetic Geometry and a publication in a top tier journal is hardly mediocre in and of itself, as far the author is concerned. The equivalent for a software engineer is probably a leading AI engineer, with a strong publication count. I think a lot of people who are not mediocre are unaware of what mediocrity actually is. Yeah if you're only in the top .1% and comparing yourself to the literal best in the w…

As a professional mathematician, if you’re not advancing your subfield of research consistently you are mediocre.

If you say so.

Saying most tenured faculty at research 1 institutions are mediocre seems to be stretching the definition, though.

Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians

#79

Post by skew-aberration »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #27
derangedHorse wrote: post #6

> My physicist friend once asked me what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything in my dissertation in a tenth of the time. I answered by pointing out that Terence Tao didn’t. Terence Tao did not find a small open problem posited by my advisor and publish a bite sized result making incremental progress. He has only so much time and so many other fish to fry. This…

> what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything A similar question is now being asked: what is the point of doing research, etc. if something like AI can figure out everything? The question betrays the parochial way in which many people think about knowledge. For them, knowledge is merely an instrument or an effect. It does not occur to them that knowing is a valua…

'All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them'

If knowing was the valuable part, then nobody would need a PhD. You could know more by just reading textbooks. Research mathematicians research, everybody else just learns.

Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians

#80

Post by wakawaka28 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #58
bananamogul wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t remember us getting to fractions in kindergarten, but maybe the curriculum has radically changed since the early 70s. What exactly is the lie? 1/4 and 3/8 equals 5/8. Is there’s something more to that? Is that fundamentally wrong?

> Is there’s something more to that? Yes: this is about building the quotient field (field of fractions) [1] for some integral domain, or more generally, building the localization ([2], [3]) of a commutative ring with respect to some given set that is closed under multiplication (the special case of the quotient field for a ring R is obtained when one chooses R\{0} as such a set). -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/in…

It's mighty pretentious to say that one needs all that theory to simply answer the question lol. For many questions, only the most rudimentary theory is plenty to get an answer, that is exactly the same answer as a more elaborate theory would yield.
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