Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 447 posts

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#191

Post by anal_reactor »

seiferteric wrote: post #24
nordsieck wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.

Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. I have had similar thoughts recently as OP thinking about what I want for my young kids and what my experiences in school were. Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. You can only get an A (or A+) in math for example, even if your a genius. But maybe y…

In my country there is a system where a kid applying to high school gets accepted based on a standard test, or can skip the line by performing well on a contest organized by the ministry of education. In my class something like 80% of kids were admitted through contests. When applying to the university there's a similar thing, except it's much harder to skip the line, but universities are free to set up their own admission rules as long as the rules are based on the national standard test. In my case, the final admission score was calculated something like "90% maths 10% everything else"

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#192

Post by pelorat »

throwaway10oct wrote: post #114
datavirtue wrote: post #2

Why aren't we working on drugs to make people smart?

I think modafinil is a wonderful drug, far more potent than caffeine or nicotine. It's also very easy to get with no long term ill effects. There is a whole subreddit dedicated to this. Wonder why more people aren't using it.

> Wonder why more people aren't using it.

Because it's classified as an amphetamine in large parts of the western world and would be illegal obtain without a prescription.

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#193

Post by FeepingCreature »

atoav wrote: post #176
seiferteric wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. I have had similar thoughts recently as OP thinking about what I want for my young kids and what my experiences in school were. Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. You can only get an A (or A+) in math for example, even if your a genius. But maybe y…

A few points on this: - How and when would you know a subject doesn't click? In my case German (my first language) and English sucked for roughly 8 years. I ended school with A in both and was the only student in my school without a single mistake in my exam. - School gives you good grades if you managed to learn the topics at hand. Being able to learn what is needed or what you are bad at — not what you want and are…

I mean, just as a counter-note: I utterly hated every second of a multitude of subjects, and indeed now I am 37 and I never needed them and was entirely correct about what I would require later.

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#194

Post by NamTaf »

returnInfinity wrote: post #144
anonzzzies wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always been only interested in the 'exact' sciences since I was a little kid; I did not do other things even if I had to. I just didn't turn up; I was doing 'more important stuff'. I graduated with a special letter from the queen; all aces for exact sciences and the rest massive fail. It turned out that this made me a good programmer and employer, so I made a shitload of money (in eu terms; pocket change compa…

What we need to do is, make the subjects interesting to learn with tech. It may now be possible with Videos, Games and VR.

Tech is not necessary. You just have to make the subjects interesting to learn. Good teachers are way more value than they are valued, and will make the classes interesting to learn.

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#195

Post by chompychop »

dyauspitr wrote: post #7

Ramanujan’s story is very interesting but I would love more Indian mathematicians and scientists to become household names. Mathematicians like Harish Chandra, C. R. Rao, Manjul Bhargava, Narendra Karmakar etc. Physicists like C. V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha. Others like Har Gobind Khorana and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan too.

Manjul Bhargava is not Indian.

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#196

Post by aguaviva »

thwori23423423 wrote: post #183
kumarm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to understand how human potential was wasted in old world, Ramanujan belongs to a caste in India that is only caste that is supposed to be educated (Representing probably Ramanujan short life itself is a loss to the world, Imagine how many Ramanujan's were ignored where there is no G.H. Hardy and what about Ramanujans in the other 95%?

[flagged]

Unsuprisingly, avowed Nazis like this ... like in Ukraine are great friends of the Western establishment.

Who are you referring to, specifically?

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#198

Post by ImHereToVote »

fragmede wrote: post #178
maeil wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the New World, the Ramanujans' lives are spent optimizing high-frequency trading, ads or video recommendation algorithms. This is arguably even worse for society than them not being discovered altogethrt.

Arguably. Assuming that's actually where they end up, they earn lots of money and they get to choose what they want to do with it. We should force them to be mathematicians if they didn't want to be? The other version in the West is he moves to rural Montana and sends bombs through the mail.

Those bombs might have done more good than his potential math career. Considering we just had our first AI millionaire. Perhaps there is hope for humanity to wake up.
Post reply on HN