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This Professor only has a PhD degree

earthsciences.hku.hk

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Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#13

Post by CurtMonash »

When I visited grad schools junior year (1975), I was told I did not need an undergraduate degree. Armed with that knowledge, I held firm in my negotiations about undergrad requirements, and the Dean of the Honors Program later thanked me for bothering to graduate.

When I did get to grad school, a couple of professors didn't have PhDs. One was my eventual thesis advisor, which was awkward in that he didn't really seem to empathize with certain stresses I was going through. ;)

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Specifics on that include:

Undergrad -- Ohio State

Grad -- Harvard, mathematics

Adviser -- Andy Gleason; I realized he didn't have a PhD in that pre-web era only after I saw his bio for the presidency of the American Mathematical Association

Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#15

Post by derrida »

As did Wittgenstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein who was an engineering drop out and wrote the Tractatus whilst a WW1 PoW in Italy, only to be given a PhD as an afterthought by Russell. I have known of an academic in a teaching and research position at a major university who did not complete high-school & was hired based on the merit of their published papers.

These are of course the very small minority to the general rule.

There are also cases of it working the other-way: PhDs that have made a lifelong contribution to their field without an academic post. Paul Erdős comes to mind... the most prolific mathematician of all time (by number of published papers) was a vagabond. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdos

(Interesting fact: both Wittgenstein and Erdős were disciples of the thought of Frank P. Ramsey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_P._Ramsey I am finding it hard to discover which degrees, if any, he had.)

Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#17

Post by seanmcdirmid »

noelwelsh wrote: post #10

I know a few cases of researchers who don't have PhDs, but I've never seen this before. Probably the best known researcher in CS who doesn't hold a PhD is Simon Peyton Jones. He is very well known in the field of programming languages and one of the main implementors of the main Haskell implementation GHC. I think he might have started a PhD in the last few years, but he was appointed a professor at Glasgow without o…

There are many many more than that, but we don't typically bother with those details; if the guy/gal knows their stuff, who cares what their degree level is?

Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#18

Post by siglesias »

derrida wrote: post #15

As did Wittgenstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein who was an engineering drop out and wrote the Tractatus whilst a WW1 PoW in Italy, only to be given a PhD as an afterthought by Russell. I have known of an academic in a teaching and research position at a major university who did not complete high-school & was hired based on the merit of their published papers. These are of course the very small minority…

And not just any PhD, a Cambridge PhD, using said Tractatus as the dissertation. Astonishing.

Re: This Professor only has a PhD degree

#20

Post by fijal »

noelwelsh wrote: post #10

I know a few cases of researchers who don't have PhDs, but I've never seen this before. Probably the best known researcher in CS who doesn't hold a PhD is Simon Peyton Jones. He is very well known in the field of programming languages and one of the main implementors of the main Haskell implementation GHC. I think he might have started a PhD in the last few years, but he was appointed a professor at Glasgow without o…

you mean "the best known researcher employed by a university as a professor"? Because a lot of VM researchers don't have a PhD.
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