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Notably, Maryam Mirzakhani is the first woman to win a Fields medal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryam_Mirzakhani
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C...
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Man, this guy is impressive as well.
He went on to found Tarsnap about a year after that exchange. The whole thread is really incredible. Just a bit further down[1] you see someone criticize him and his startup (Tarsnap) for having a "phenomenal misunderstanding of what it takes to create a successful software startup." And then Drew Houston of Dropbox chimes in to say that he's building a similar backup solution.
Your chronology is a bit off -- I started writing code about a year before that thread. I had my first alpha testers at the time, and opened Tarsnap to the general public a few months later.
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Well, as an undergrad, she went to one of the best universities in the world. http://www.newsweek.com/surprising-success-irans-universitie... We don't hear about it much, but Iran has one of the best universities in the world.
It's important to note that successful Iranians generally become successful _despite_ the country they grow up in, not because of it. In my opinion, and having first-hand experience with that environment, the credit for this incredible achievement belongs to her and herself only.
The medal is not just Artur brilliance and hard work, but also due to the IMPA: http://www.impa.br/ A sixty years old institution that gathered Brazil best mathematicians and gave Artur the resources to become a great researcher. Brazil had to cultivate and invest in this institution for decades.
Iran has great universities: http://www.newsweek.com/surprising-success-irans-universitie... The Medal is is probably just crowning their hard work.
A pity only very few people in the world can fully understand the beauty of the mathematical proofs these geniuses created
A pity only very few people in the world can fully understand the beauty of the mathematical proofs these geniuses created
It is weird. Doing great mathematics is like writing great poetry in a language only a few hundred people can read. And yet, every once in a while a mathematical poem changes the world.
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It's important to note that successful Iranians generally become successful _despite_ the country they grow up in, not because of it. In my opinion, and having first-hand experience with that environment, the credit for this incredible achievement belongs to her and herself only.
I don't know of the details of the Math World, but probably this isn't true. Till now, a country as big as Brazil, one of the biggest economies of the world, never had won none of the most important scientific prizes. Argentina, our neighbor, has 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_coun... The medal is not just Artur brilliance and hard work, but also due to the IMPA: http://www.impa.br/ A sixt…
The outcome of this is simple: you'll have selected top N individuals from an exam of half a million people and put them in a single school. Of course you're going to see those people shine. That says _nothing_ about the absolute quality of what that school gives you, just how good it is relative to its peers in the country, and I define quality as "output - input". The "input" is high quality, but the delta is merely meh in my opinion. Also, the students are high quality--the faculty are generally not (unlike what's mentioned in the article), but they do end up taking some credit.
In terms of the contribution of the country, I can just say that she is a survivor of an accident years ago, where seven talented math students died, whom had similar achievements to hers at the time. Overall, the contribution of the country to its mathematicians has been negative, specifically so to the female ones.
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Well, as an undergrad, she went to one of the best universities in the world. http://www.newsweek.com/surprising-success-irans-universitie... We don't hear about it much, but Iran has one of the best universities in the world.
It's important to note that successful Iranians generally become successful _despite_ the country they grow up in, not because of it. In my opinion, and having first-hand experience with that environment, the credit for this incredible achievement belongs to her and herself only.
If some one is good enough to win Fields medal every one and every thing around works more like friction to their overall direction. And that's true for every country in the world.
Martin Hairer is a OS X developer and the author of the fantastic Amadeus multi-track audio editor. http://www.hairersoft.com
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You should see one of my all-time favorite Hacker news threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
Even more impressive is Drew houston chiming in. cperciva would've been a billionaire (not that he cares :))!
Doubtful. First, Forbes says that dhouston has a net worth of $1.2B; and even if I had been an extra cofounder, splitting the cofounder shares more ways would have brought it below $1B.
Second, I really doubt I could have stuck it out at Dropbox for the necessary time. I like to do things in ways which are technically right rather than necessarily financially right; Dropbox is a phenomenally successful business, but it's not a product which I like.