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Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

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Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#111

Post by antareus »

variety wrote: post #103
dmlorenzetti wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. I could have written "bored by the whole exercise" rather than saying she had "checked out of the conversation". To recap-- my brother said, literally, one sentence. I added one more sentence, relating the question to another field of study. Our friend was instantly, irremediably, and unabashedly bored. From which I concluded that she took little pleasure in exploring any aspect of the statement she herself…

That she was "bored" by the exercise doesn't necessarily mean that she doesn't share you and your brother's bold, hard-driving, searingly intense curiosity about the world, and the nature of our ability to infer knowledge about it. It might, instead, have had something do with the fact that the point you guys were trying to make was rather trivial.

Exactly. Nobody cares if the exact details aren't 100% correct in a non-technical discussion. Suppose I begin recounting a blog entry which describes an odd situation. I may not remember all the details right, but I certainly have the gist of it and can convey that. There is no point in someone stepping in and saying, "you know, it was actually in Des Moines, not Dallas," if the city is entirely irrelevant to actual content of the post.

What is the group supposed to do with that statement? Someone has to segue back to the original topic, while someone else just lost face. Most people will just either ignore the correction entirely, or just drop the topic altogether.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#112

Post by hugh3 »

crocowhile wrote: post #86
kwantam wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's completely fair. We all reinvent the wheel sometimes. That hilarious part is that this paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal--- and none of the reviewers realized that he'd rediscovered some 17th century math.

"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." — James D. Watson

To be fair, James D. Watson is a bit of a jerk who delights in calling other people stupid. Usually winning a Nobel Prize tends to make people more charitable, since they no longer need to prove themselves to anybody... apparently it didn't work for Watson.

I wouldn't recommend following Watson's advice on the correct attitude to your fellow man.

For further information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Watson and scroll down to "Controversies".

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#113

Post by mhartl »

rue wrote: post #77

Come on now, many of you proudly tout how you were taught integration in secondary education. Big deal. This person discovered it for themselves, and that is an achievement to be celebrated.

Rediscovering integration is wonderful. Managing to get it published in a peer-reviewed medical journal is not.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#114

Post by beambot »

dmlorenzetti wrote: post #21

The author calls out med students for approaching physics through rote memorization. It reminds me of an experience my older brother and I had with a doctor friend. Our friend, an OB/GYN, mentioned how hard her work is, because "the average baby is born at 3am." We laughed, but then my brother asked, "What does 'average' mean when you have a 24-hour clock? It must mean the modal time or something like that." I contri…

You can still say "average" (mean) for distributions over cycles (eg. on circles, von Mises distributions are analogous to Gaussians).

von Mises on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises_distribution

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#115

Post by beambot »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #60
dmlorenzetti wrote: post #21

The author calls out med students for approaching physics through rote memorization. It reminds me of an experience my older brother and I had with a doctor friend. Our friend, an OB/GYN, mentioned how hard her work is, because "the average baby is born at 3am." We laughed, but then my brother asked, "What does 'average' mean when you have a 24-hour clock? It must mean the modal time or something like that." I contri…

Of course you can average times of day, as well as wind directions. Express them as vectors on a 2-D plane, then separately average the components in each dimension. Although this is somewhat obvious in the case of wind measurements, it works for times of day as well if you think of them as points on a 24-hour clock face. Your medical friend was not checked out. She was busy stifling impolite laughter at your unfamil…

That may be a decent "hack" approach, but more generally you should use distributions meant to operate on circles, eg. von Mises (analagous to Gaussians): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises_distribution

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#116

Post by btilly »

hugh3 wrote: post #112
crocowhile wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." — James D. Watson

To be fair, James D. Watson is a bit of a jerk who delights in calling other people stupid. Usually winning a Nobel Prize tends to make people more charitable, since they no longer need to prove themselves to anybody... apparently it didn't work for Watson. I wouldn't recommend following Watson's advice on the correct attitude to your fellow man. For further information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Wats…

I would speculate that the reason it didn't work for Watson is the unacknowledged use of Rosalind Franklin's data, with the resulting belief by many that Watson couldn't have done it on his own. The fact that Rosalind died in part due to radiation absorbed during collecting that data adds to the controversy.

Here is a piece of interesting trivia about that. Rosalind Franklin was a true expert on x-ray diffraction. However there are 230 possible space groups. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_group for more on that.) The x-ray diffraction pattern you see depends on the space group, and so one of the first step is to go through all of the possibilities and identify which one you have, and only then can you really start figuring out what you have. Rosalind Franklin knew about all of them. But by luck Watson's PhD thesis had been on a protein with the exact same set of symmetries that DNA has. As a result he was in a much better position than she to interpret her data.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#117

Post by Leptosiphon »

mbreese wrote: post #37
Leptosiphon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calculus is not taught to everyone in high school. Many students only make it as far as precalculus and many more, even if they take calculus in high school do not learn integration. At the college level, many biology students do not take calculus. As far as calculus being a requirement for entrance into med school, in many cases I am afraid you are incorrect. http://www.cse.emory.edu/sciencenet/additional_math_reqs.…

Calculus, per se, isn't a requirement, but physics is covered pretty heavily on the MCAT. And last I checked, you needed calculus for college level physics.

Most universities have a physics sequence that does not require physics. A major reason this sequence exists, at least at the university that employs me, is pre-med students. Also, physics is not "covered heavily" on the MCAT.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#118

Post by manicbovine »

whatwhat wrote: post #41
manicbovine wrote: post #22

As a mathematician, I see this as a sign that my field needs an evangelist.

Can I ask you a question? Why is rote memorization frowned upon in math? I'm a second year math student about to enter his third year. I enter a lot of the definitions, theorems, etc. into a flash card software (Anki) for memorization. I combine this with doing tons of proofs and problems from various textbooks depending upon the course I'm studying. I would say from personal experience that rote memorization has def…

There are already some great answers to this question.

Math begins with intuition. We don't memorize facts in order to build intuition -- we explore, discover, and synthesize. Formalism is an impediment to the early stages of this process. The most blatant example is set theory. Nearly everyone has a basic grasp of naive set theory and hardly any layperson has a basic grasp of formal set theory.

Just as an aside, many of the most interesting things in mathematics are extremely counterintuitive. It also turns out that our intuition is broken and leads us to say crazy things. Again, set theory has clear examples.

Back to the point, the things you memorize help to organize your untamed mathematical data. I seriously doubt that you'd have any good results from memorizing something about which you do not have intuition.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#119

Post by whatwhat »

jacobolus wrote: post #105
tel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the intended target, but I'll throw in my two c from doing a lot of applied math. Math readily has two components. The first is a formulaic, formal component that can be readily overcome by rote. The second is the more freeform conceptual understanding that motivates and directs the first. I feel confident that if you ask anyone familiar with advanced math if they understand concept/theorem/tool X, they'll say ye…

To elaborate on this, a working knowledge of some area of mathematics is not like a set of historical facts to be familiar with, or a list of fundamental particles and their properties, or a group of plays or novels to be quoted from, or a set of pigments and their interactions with brushes and paper, or even a code library’s API. Mathematics is, fundamentally, about model building. The study of mathematics is about…

Thanks.

Re: Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

#120

Post by crocowhile »

hugh3 wrote: post #112
crocowhile wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." — James D. Watson

To be fair, James D. Watson is a bit of a jerk who delights in calling other people stupid. Usually winning a Nobel Prize tends to make people more charitable, since they no longer need to prove themselves to anybody... apparently it didn't work for Watson. I wouldn't recommend following Watson's advice on the correct attitude to your fellow man. For further information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Wats…

Yes, Watson is a known jerk who got hit badly by age. That doesn't mean he's wrong when he claims most scientists are stupid. They are.
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