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

The two cultures of mathematics and biology (2014)

liorpachter.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 38 posts

Re: The two cultures of mathematics and biology (2014)

#21

Post by nyssos »

jp57 wrote: post #14

The estrangement he observes aren't that surprising, in either direction. Many universities have both Math and Applied Math departments. Why have both unless the mathematicians in the Math department don't want to work on applications? I have spoken with people who say if you're working on an application, "it's not really math." In biology, there is almost certainly a self-selection effect in which the field attracts…

> Many universities have both Math and Applied Math departments. Why have both unless the mathematicians in the Math department don't want to work on applications?

"Applied Mathematics" as a field is not literally "mathematics applied to something"; it's a fuzzy group of related topics (things like numerical analysis, PDEs, or computational linear algebra) that's grown large and culturally distinct enough to have its own department, much like theoretical CS or statistics. There are plenty of "applied" mathematicians who don't work on applications, and some "pure" mathematicians who do.

Re: The two cultures of mathematics and biology (2014)

#22

Post by nyssos »

chongli wrote: post #13
DrScientist wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is there any science at all above pure maths? Why isn't physics, chemistry, geology etc etc just maths? That's because choosing the right level of abstraction is really important for making practical progress. For example penicillin was discovered and used to save millions of lives without any rigorous mathematical understanding of how the drug interacts with it's target. I'm not saying maths isn't incredibly use…

Also I do wonder sometimes whether mathematicians don't actually understand some of the maths they work on We don’t. One of the first steps to mathematical maturity is learning to let go of the need to understand, the need to visualize. Much of mathematics is a formal affair of making arguments to satisfy necessary and sufficient conditions. Trying to understand infinite-dimensional spaces or highly abstract sets and…

> Much of mathematics is a formal affair of making arguments to satisfy necessary and sufficient conditions.

Some areas have a formalist culture like this (descriptive set theory seems to, for instance, though that might just be what it looks like from the outside), but it's far from universal. At the other end of the spectrum I find it hard to imagine anyone getting far with algebraic geometry without building intuition. And then of course in mathematical physics the intuition-frontier is always decades ahead of the formal one.

Re: The two cultures of mathematics and biology (2014)

#23

Post by melagonster »

miguelmurca wrote: post #11

While I agree that it's very questionable that Nature would invite someone to write an obituary (or what have you) and then reject it, I fail to see what's so controversial about the text being overly technical. I work in Physics, and "[...] locus of solutions of sets of polynomial equations by combining the algebraic properties of the rings of polynomials with the geometric properties of this locus, known as a varie…

this is unfortunately, author keep talk about this is useful in phylogeny, but biologists who work on phylogeny is not popular in the group of biologists who frequently publishing articles on Nature.

Re: The two cultures of mathematics and biology (2014)

#24

Post by fritzo »

While Pachter enumerates differences in culture and breakdowns in collaboration, I feel the root cause is individual social attitude. The two cultures differ because their self-selected members differ in personality. What drew me to study math was the department's attitude of anarchy and irreverence. Status didn't matter, funding didn't matter, appearance didn't matter, prerequisites didn't matter, you just needed two people and two pieces of chalk and a blackboard and an afternoon. By contrast biologists I've worked with have been acutely attuned to hierarchy and funding strategy and marketing and credit attribution - social maneuvering that would fall as flat in math departments[1] as "third cohomology group" falls flat on Nature's reviewers.

[1] in my limited experience of two math departments

Re: The two cultures of mathematics and biology (2014)

#25

Post by tbitrust »

fritzo wrote: post #24

While Pachter enumerates differences in culture and breakdowns in collaboration, I feel the root cause is individual social attitude. The two cultures differ because their self-selected members differ in personality. What drew me to study math was the department's attitude of anarchy and irreverence. Status didn't matter, funding didn't matter, appearance didn't matter, prerequisites didn't matter, you just needed tw…

> Status didn't matter

Allow me to doubt that mathematics departments are immune to status competition.

Re: The two cultures of mathematics and biology (2014)

#26

Post by fritzo »

tbitrust wrote: post #25
fritzo wrote: post #24

While Pachter enumerates differences in culture and breakdowns in collaboration, I feel the root cause is individual social attitude. The two cultures differ because their self-selected members differ in personality. What drew me to study math was the department's attitude of anarchy and irreverence. Status didn't matter, funding didn't matter, appearance didn't matter, prerequisites didn't matter, you just needed tw…

> Status didn't matter Allow me to doubt that mathematics departments are immune to status competition.

Sure a segment of the population aims for department head, but another segment is happy just being left alone to do their thing and pay via teaching. It was this less ambitious more self-motivated group who attracted me.

Re: The two cultures of mathematics and biology (2014)

#27

Post by nextos »

fritzo wrote: post #26
tbitrust wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Status didn't matter Allow me to doubt that mathematics departments are immune to status competition.

Sure a segment of the population aims for department head, but another segment is happy just being left alone to do their thing and pay via teaching. It was this less ambitious more self-motivated group who attracted me.

I think you are super right. As someone with extensive Math and pure CS training, this has been my experience working in Biology vs Math departments.

Re: The two cultures of mathematics and biology (2014)

#28

Post by Herring »

These kinds of articles are not helpful. "Why isn't A talking to B? Isn't that so sad?".

People are busy (on both sides). If Mathematicians want to want to get Biologists' attention, they should do something like Deepmind's AlphaFold - tackle a long-standing extremely difficult problem in biology using mathematical approaches.

Re: The two cultures of mathematics and biology (2014)

#29

Post by Aromasin »

nyssos wrote: post #21
jp57 wrote: post #14

The estrangement he observes aren't that surprising, in either direction. Many universities have both Math and Applied Math departments. Why have both unless the mathematicians in the Math department don't want to work on applications? I have spoken with people who say if you're working on an application, "it's not really math." In biology, there is almost certainly a self-selection effect in which the field attracts…

> Many universities have both Math and Applied Math departments. Why have both unless the mathematicians in the Math department don't want to work on applications? "Applied Mathematics" as a field is not literally "mathematics applied to something"; it's a fuzzy group of related topics (things like numerical analysis, PDEs, or computational linear algebra) that's grown large and culturally distinct enough to have its…

Applied Mathematics certainly has the intention of using Math to solve problems from other fields though. I studied Robotics, and shared several classes with people from the Applied Mathematics course; * Transportation Modelling (using math to model transport on roads, rail, and shipping, and solve optimisation problems) * Computer Vision (using math to recognise patterns in images) * Biomechanics (using math to model the movement and formation of all things biology; we did everything from a sperm cell locomotion to an Achilles tendon spring strength)

There were others, but all of them had a very practical purpose, and most of the people I spent time with on the Applied Mathematics course were actively pursuing a career in engineering of some sort, while the Mathematics course was made up of either Pure Math people looking to go into academia, or people destined for finance.

Re: The two cultures of mathematics and biology (2014)

#30

Post by waterheater »

For a ten year old article, it holds up remarkably well. Grant writing and academic research are typically divergent skill sets. Since research grants (the vast majority from DHHS, NSF, and DoD) have become a major source of revenue for universities, the most valuable faculty to a university are those who acquire grants, leading universities to hire faculty who will likely acquire many grants. These faculty select for similar students, and the cycle continues. Because pure mathematics research is intrinsically resource-minimal, the same paradigm doesn't work over there.

In a possible reflection of that reality, I have a strong feeling that, on average, university biology departments are housed in much newer and nicer buildings than university mathematics departments.

Post reply on HN