Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What do grad students in math do all day?

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 76 posts

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#31

Post by joshrotenberg »

smoyer wrote: post #3

"Can use use a vacuum cleaner to clean a cat?" ... Yes, but I've found that the cat might not like it. I'd also recommend using the upholstery tool and whatever you do, don't allow the cats tail (or any other part) to come into contact with the rotating brushes. For a moderately dirty cat, the vacuum's suction should be enough. If you have a really dirty cat, or a lot of cats to clean at once, try an automatic car wa…

My cats hate the vacuum but one of them absolutely loves to be swept on his back with the broom. He's old school like that.

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#32

Post by Widdershin »

wheaties wrote: post #10
algorias wrote: post #8

An incredibly accurate depiction of research in any theoretical field, I'd say. Compound that with the fact that during your education you're mostly presented with texts that summarize decades or more of research into a scant few pages as if the people involved had just flowed naturally from one idea to the next, from a problem statement to the incredibly complex idea that unlocks the proof. When it's finally your tu…

Agreed. After doing 2 years I left with a masters and never looked back. What is even scarier than the minuscule contributions you might make is the few that have done anything but minuscule. Those people are amazingly smart. By the way, cats do like vacuums... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCzkm2z4-6g

That's the part of the article that stuck out to me. I mean, I used to have a lovely ginger cat who liked nothing more than to be vacuumed. I think that the author should ensure that his cat vacuuming experiments are more rigorous in future.

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#33

Post by jbl »

mhurron wrote: post #26
the_bear wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad is an accounting professor, and while I don't think he normally involves undergrads in his research, it seems like he could. This is just one small segment of business research, but he tests how rules and incentives impact decision making. For example, make a game where two people are teamed up. You give person A $10 and tell them they can give as much as they want to person B, and that's it. How much does per…

That sounds more like Sociology. As an aside, I believe my first post and this one could sound like I'm trying to be a dick, I'm honestly not. I am wondering and interested. Business majors and related (like your accounting professor father) always seemed to me to be more practical degrees and not really research fields.

Former Sociology Ph.D. candidate here.

Yes, a lot of b-school research crosses fields. I've worked with b-school profs doing work across sociology, economics, law (to a lesser degree), computer science, and mathematics. The difference between research in those fields and b-school research seems to be that the b-school profs had more of an applied bent. The b-school research was more motivated by practical business problems.

Of course, much like programs within a discipline can be radically different from university to university, I imagine there's also a range of research styles across b-schools.

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#34

Post by iliis »

Widdershin wrote: post #32
wheaties wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. After doing 2 years I left with a masters and never looked back. What is even scarier than the minuscule contributions you might make is the few that have done anything but minuscule. Those people are amazingly smart. By the way, cats do like vacuums... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCzkm2z4-6g

That's the part of the article that stuck out to me. I mean, I used to have a lovely ginger cat who liked nothing more than to be vacuumed. I think that the author should ensure that his cat vacuuming experiments are more rigorous in future.

Well, my cat gets scared to death by a vacuum cleaner. She darts out of the room as soon as it's turned on.

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#36

Post by andrewflnr »

smoyer wrote: post #3

"Can use use a vacuum cleaner to clean a cat?" ... Yes, but I've found that the cat might not like it. I'd also recommend using the upholstery tool and whatever you do, don't allow the cats tail (or any other part) to come into contact with the rotating brushes. For a moderately dirty cat, the vacuum's suction should be enough. If you have a really dirty cat, or a lot of cats to clean at once, try an automatic car wa…

You sound like you've done some serious research about bulk cat washing. You should write a paper.

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#37

Post by army »

jackpirate wrote: post #29
jhales wrote: post #14

I'm just finishing a math PhD. Talking to CS PhD's my impression is that we do pretty much the same thing, we just work on different domains.

I'm a CS PhD, and I agree. I always tell people I'm studying math because it gives them much more of a flavor for what I'm actually doing everyday. When I say computer science, people think I'm just programming something. Also, when people ask me, "So What do you actually do studying math?" I reply, "Sit and stare at the wall for several hours a day. Occasionally I write something down."

It does depend a lot on the sub-field of CS.

For systems work you spend a lot of time implementing ideas and running experiments. In a lot of cases it isn't necessarily that difficult to find an interesting idea that's probably viable. The real work is spending a lot of time writing code and work out all the annoying details to get to the point where you have a decent proof of concept.

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#39

Post by army »

graycat wrote: post #19

Yes, when as a math grad student I saw some of that, I developed some opinions and ideas to look for more productive approaches. Somewhere I read: "There is a famous recipe for rabbit stew that starts out, 'First catch a rabbit'.", and I changed that to, "There is a recipe for how to do applied mathematics, first get an application.". For more, commonly the main criteria for 'research' is that it be "new, correct, an…

Mathematizing a fields is a bit of a double edged sword though and I think needs a great deal of skepticism and caution. Yes, if you do it right you can get insights and prove things more rigorously. If you do it wrong, the mathematics can easily become divorced from reality: it really does require ongoing skepticism and awareness of the connection between whatever mathematical abstractions you've built and reality.

In computer science, assuming constant factors in algorithms don't matter is a useful approximation that makes it much easier to do mathematical analysis. But constant factors are very important in practice.

Also, plenty of academic economics research has gone off the deep end with more and more elaborate mathematical models based on assumptions that don't jive with reality.

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#40

Post by Evbn »

rsofaer wrote: post #27
Evbn wrote: post #21

Sounds like what math grad students did 50 years ago, before we solved all the pure math even tenuously related to the 4 dimensional reality we live in.

You are just wrong. For example, algebraic topology is one of the most abstract subjects I hear conversations about week. It has applications in physics, data analysis, and numerical computing. Also, saying that reality is 4-dimensional is hooding yourself. The machine learning techniques we use everywhere depend on the math of higher-dimensional spaces, and they wouldn't work if reality couldn't be meaningfully view…

Please share a link to an example paper published by a pure math department.
Post reply on HN