131–140 of 145 posts
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…
Sounds like a great way to hire academics rather than people with industry experience.
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Tao's blog is quite interesting.
I feel good about myself if I can understand more than the first sentence of any of his posts. Some days I'll even settle for only the first. Great mathematicians are said to be exceptional at visualization. I wonder if the modern greats think in TeX or LaTeX on top of that. It is amazing how fast they post fully-formed, meticulously referenced blog articles or upload preprints.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/a-symmetric-formul...
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> In fluids, Bernoulli devised experiments to demonstrate to his calculus illiterate colleagues what he had already mathematically proven. Maybe I misunderstood you, but I have the feeling you're downplaying the importance of experiments in Physics. Once you mathematically prove something, you proved that a statement is true when given a certain set of axioms. This is enough in Mathematics, like your example of the P…
Im about to jump in the shower, son cant go inti detail. Just that the best theories in physics, our best foundations, were not made by an incremental tic-toc theory-experiment cycle. There were bursts of genius that eventually got proven. Im reading Truesdell's (America's greatest 20th century physicist?) book now where he goes through the history of fluid mechanics and the paucity of experiments. If I remember ill…
"The computer: ruin of science and threat to mankind”
https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/~ball/Miscelleaneous%20Article...
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These go by different names at different schools, but a grad student has to pass an oral exam, roughly at the end of their coursework and beginning of their dissertation phase. Sometimes called "orals," "comprehensive exams," etc. By tradition, they can ask you anything. But in practice, they're not out to kill you. I went to a second tier university, and it was generally believed that the questions at a top school t…
> Sometimes called "orals," "comprehensive exams," etc. — other names I have heard people use for these: prelims, quals, ...
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I keep making this mistake. I almost asked "why philosophy, didn't he study physics?" That does make me wonder: why DOES the qualification/position/status name mention only philosophy?
Because academics love to cling to outdated and today factually incorrect terminology, while arrogantly berating the general public when they do the same. "Actually, it's not called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis anymore. The preferred term is 'linguistic relativity' now." ... while you keep using titles that have been nonsensical for 200 years. Got it. Academia is 99% power games. The emperor wears no clothes.
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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.
For sure, definitely not equating my PhD experience to Tao's. I felt like even in my viva the examiners didn't push me too hard and stuck close to the material in the thesis. Probably due to my decidedly non-prodigy status!
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!
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Im about to jump in the shower, son cant go inti detail. Just that the best theories in physics, our best foundations, were not made by an incremental tic-toc theory-experiment cycle. There were bursts of genius that eventually got proven. Im reading Truesdell's (America's greatest 20th century physicist?) book now where he goes through the history of fluid mechanics and the paucity of experiments. If I remember ill…
Truesdell is amazing, I like this quote: "The computer: ruin of science and threat to mankind” https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/~ball/Miscelleaneous%20Article...