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Terry Tao's generals (2012)

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Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#121

Post by stanford_labrat »

bmitc wrote: post #76
jebarker wrote: post #37

This is the first time I've read a detailed account of "generals" in a US math PhD. I'm surprised how broad the topics covered seem. I did my PhD in the UK and the transition to fully fledged PhD candidate after the first couple of years was significantly less traumatic than this seems!

Granted, this is at Princeton and for a child prodigy. Certainly only a few schools in the U.S. will have oral exams like this. Also, there's a potentiality of an unreliable narrator and certainly a modicum of figurative dick measuring on both sides of the examination table.

In life sciences the qualifying exam is an oral exam where they can in theory ask you anything. In comparison with for example the physics qualifying exam which (as I’m told) is a traditional paper exam, just ridiculously difficult.

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#122

Post by Nevermark »

thsksbd wrote: post #103
Nevermark wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physics was also philosophy for eons in that theories were on par with hard knowledge about the gods and mermaids. Most early physic had surprisingly little explanatory or experimental connection to the actual physical world. But it often made up for that with a solid grounding in popular mythology and the produce of some extraordinary imaginations. You know, like philosophy!

Thats a gross mischaracterization of the ancients. Anyway, those crazies came up with atomistic theory to explain silly myths.... and ended up explaining phase change as an emergent phenomenon.

You are overlooking a lot. Then and today.

The ancients were not just the famous Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Indian and Chinese philosophers, who made progress in reasoning.

Human's across every culture have spun creative explanations for natural phenomena, going back as far as we have any records.

- Why does it rain? How can we make it rain?

- What are the planets? What do their cycles and alignments mean?

- What is an illness? How do we avoid it? Cure it?

Even those philosophers were not immune to this kind of thinking.

Non/Pre-scientific answers to unanswerable questions gave satisfied people’s need for order and gave them hope.

Today, many people still take such answers seriously where there is no science (afterlife, cosmic justice, ...), and even where there is (astrology, crystals, etc.)

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#123

Post by dctoedt »

ColinWright wrote: post #68
I_AM_A_SMURF wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a while writing LaTeX becomes second nature. I used to type my master's classes notes straight in LaTeX.

Times have changed. We didn't have laptops in classes ... laptops didn't exist. And I wrote my PhD in TeX. Not LaTeX ... that hadn't been invented.

> Times have changed ... I wrote my PhD in TeX. Not LaTeX ... that hadn't been invented.

Brings to mind when I first learned TOPS-20 Emacs in law school (long story), circa 1980-81: A few of the CS grad students tolerantly looked down on Emacs as a crutch for newbies, because any real programmer would use TECO instead ....

(IIRC, that version of Emacs was written as a collection of TECO macros.)

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/378/

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#124

Post by OldGuyInTheClub »

ColinWright wrote: post #68
I_AM_A_SMURF wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a while writing LaTeX becomes second nature. I used to type my master's classes notes straight in LaTeX.

Times have changed. We didn't have laptops in classes ... laptops didn't exist. And I wrote my PhD in TeX. Not LaTeX ... that hadn't been invented.

No laptops in my era, either. I managed to do my thesis in LaTeX only because a student in another department made a stylesheet to the expected format. Figures and captions were a struggle back then.

But, we were 'appy in them days, though we wuz poor.

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#125

Post by nvarsj »

hintymad wrote: post #65

This seems a great way for system design interviews. Interviewer: what do you know about transactions? Candidate: Transactions can be serializable. Interviewer: great, tell me the difference between final state serializability and view state serializability and prove that they are the same if neither of them has dead step. Candidate: yada yada yada. Interviewer: Can you tell me how to use such concepts in implementin…

Reading TFA I actually was reminded of doing system design interviews. It has a pretty similar vibe. Although the interviewers here seemed a lot more lenient than ones I've experienced in tech (Tao saying he "barely passed" kinda confirms it).

Not something fun to go through, that's for sure!

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#126

Post by picadores »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #115
sampo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Von Neumann(an Austrian aristocrat) Usually Von Neumann is thought to be Hungarian. Born in Budapest, which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Also not really an aristocrat, more like an upper-middle class banker's family. The "von ..." was more of a faux title, although his family did have an honorary nobility title (a different one) received a few decades before.

In europe -every upstart family, at some point tried to get the "von und zu","van", "de" only exemption from this is the english aristocracy.. were you glue a "lord" or "lady" in front of the name, instead of a addition bewetween name and surname.

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#127

Post by FabHK »

lou1306 wrote: post #101
christudor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because doctor comes from the passive doctus ('having been taught', i.e. learned) rather than the active docens ('teaching, instructing').

Not really. Doctor means "teacher" in classical Latin.

Good point. English has both actor (=someone who acts) and agent (=someone who acts) from agere = to act, and both doctor (=someone who teaches) and docent (=someone who teaches) from docere = to teach.

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#128

Post by buntsai »

thsksbd wrote: post #106
zem wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Im not learning science when I learn about evolution; rather Im learning a theory, very likely to be true, that is almost impossible to put under scrutiny using the scientific method. the very definition of a "theory" in the scientific sense of the word (e.g. "theory of evolution") includes the ability to test it using the scientific method. the wikipedia page goes into great detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…

It wasn't a hit on evolution, I specifically stated that it is as true as anything lacking a mathematical proof can be. And yes, I know about little bugs changing color and bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics. But, strictly speaking, that isnt what we're taught is "science" in 10th grade, is it? That's really an observation of what we cannot control fitting nicely into our theories. The embarrassing thing abou…

Some of your points are very curious. Biologists did not reject horizontal gene transfer. Or at any rate it has been part of the canon for pretty much the last 60 years which is essentially forever in biology. (The mechanisms for heredity, i.e. DNA were only discovered in the early 1950s). Besides, scientists are always "tweaking" theories as you put it. More precisely, a fruitful and productive scientific program leads to more and more discovers and elaborations that have to be accomodated. Look at the changes in the Standard Model in particle physics. The current controversy is whether and why the Standard Model is no longer being "tweaked". In other words, some physicist wonder whether current research is no longer yielding discoveries that allow advances and hences changes or elaborations to the Standard Model.

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#129

Post by CraigRo »

tester756 wrote: post #74
CraigRo wrote: post #46

First of all, nobody ever passed these exams with flying colors unless the examiners wanted that to happen or were having a bad day. Assume that there are three full professors testing you, and they have an average of 20 years each of post-graduate experience. That's 60 years of reading -- no way that a 2nd or 3rd year graduate student can keep up. Part of the process is humiliating the students a bit -- they did thi…

>Assume that there are three full professors testing you, and they have an average of 20 years each of post-graduate experience. That's 60 years of reading who cares? 10 juniors with year of experience don't make it even close to decade of experience

Typically exams are 2 full professors and maybe one asst prof. That asst prof will be 3-4 years in, plus 4-5 years of grad school + often a postdoc. And that asst prof will, on average, be better than the graduate student.

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#130

Post by OldGuyInTheClub »

mijoharas wrote: post #81
OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #14

Thought this Oppenheimer anecdote may amuse the HN contingent. "Oppenheimer obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in March 1927 at age 23, supervised by Max Born.[28][29] After the oral exam, James Franck, the professor administering, reportedly said, "I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me."[30] " Franck had won the Nobel two years earlier. Sources: [Refs] quoted directly from Wikipedia artic…

So, one of my favourite stories is Witggenstein's Phd viva. He submitted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as his PhD thesis. Apparently on the way into his viva he said to Bertrand Russel "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it.".[0] He passed with flying colours. (Note: I tried to google and didn't find a primary source, but post saying the same thing I remembered, so possible citation needed here) [0] htt…

I have tried to read the Tractatus a couple of times and whiffed majorly. I think Wittgestein foresaw Powerpoint culture and created a (the only?) major philosophical work[0] consisting of just bullet points.

[0] True, I didn't understand it but it clearly has had an impact!

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