21–30 of 111 posts
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Karpathy! Carmack!
Carmack? I love him but that can’t be a serious suggestion
Euler's wikipedia page has one of the most casually jawdropping sentences I've ever read about a human being: "Euler's work averages 800 pages a year from 1725 to 1783. He also wrote over 4500 letters and hundreds of manuscripts. It has been estimated that Leonard Euler was the author of a quarter of the combined output in mathematics, physics, mechanics, astronomy, and navigation in the 18th century." A quarter of a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always stress how our public education is broken since it can't handle extreme talent very good. Important breakthroughs that advance one or more fields extremely or shifting paradigms completely, were done or prepared by whizzkids. In these times, we need every whizzkid we can get.
Education is a cog/mandarin factory in most countries. Whizzkids will educate themselves, what's needed is giving people idle time in order to pursue things. Most influential thinkers found themselves with this in some fashion. How much talent is wasted making people jump through hoops in academia/finance/ad-tech? A lot of pre-industrial thinkers were associated with the clergy because they received tax money from pe…
I have read a few of these and enjoyed them greatly. Reading them you realise that Euler really did invent a huge swathe of mathematics in use today. In particular I read this one: http://eulerarchive.maa.org/hedi/HEDI-2009-02.pdf And I realised that Euler had found two formulae for Pi which can be used to calculate any hex digit of Pi. I wrote this up in a paper: "In 1779 Euler discovered two formulas for π which ca…
It's interesting to me that I can't think of anyone remotely comparable to Euler in the public consciousness today. Even the work of someone like Erdos seems very esoteric by comparison and also was largely done in collaboration. Was Euler just born at the right time and picking all the low hanging fruit? Or maybe his immense creative production was a unique consequence of wealth plus limited distractions? I'm inclin…
I have no data to back it up.
I could imagine that in 300 years time people think that Elon Musk single-handedly invented the Turing machine, at the age of 16, during a weekend, while reading Hacker News.
How would one go about disproving such an hypothesis? I've had similar doubts about Leonardo da Vinci, but I'm afraid Euler was actually just brilliant.
It's interesting to me that I can't think of anyone remotely comparable to Euler in the public consciousness today. Even the work of someone like Erdos seems very esoteric by comparison and also was largely done in collaboration. Was Euler just born at the right time and picking all the low hanging fruit? Or maybe his immense creative production was a unique consequence of wealth plus limited distractions? I'm inclin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always stress how our public education is broken since it can't handle extreme talent very good. Important breakthroughs that advance one or more fields extremely or shifting paradigms completely, were done or prepared by whizzkids. In these times, we need every whizzkid we can get.
Education is a cog/mandarin factory in most countries. Whizzkids will educate themselves, what's needed is giving people idle time in order to pursue things. Most influential thinkers found themselves with this in some fashion. How much talent is wasted making people jump through hoops in academia/finance/ad-tech? A lot of pre-industrial thinkers were associated with the clergy because they received tax money from pe…
There's a robust multi-level system of "Olympiads", starting from the neighborhood level, and going all the way up to the national level. Every student knows about them, and more importantly, "magnet schools" scoop up students who do well in competitions.
This works really well for math, and so pretty much every Fields medal award ceremony has awardees from the xUSSR countries.
I'm really surprised that this kind of system is not more widespread, especially in the US. After all, sports and competition is kinda a thing here?
Euler's wikipedia page has one of the most casually jawdropping sentences I've ever read about a human being: "Euler's work averages 800 pages a year from 1725 to 1783. He also wrote over 4500 letters and hundreds of manuscripts. It has been estimated that Leonard Euler was the author of a quarter of the combined output in mathematics, physics, mechanics, astronomy, and navigation in the 18th century." A quarter of a…
I always stress how our public education is broken since it can't handle extreme talent very good. Important breakthroughs that advance one or more fields extremely or shifting paradigms completely, were done or prepared by whizzkids. In these times, we need every whizzkid we can get.
15% failure rate is optimal for learning
I have read a few of these and enjoyed them greatly. Reading them you realise that Euler really did invent a huge swathe of mathematics in use today. In particular I read this one: http://eulerarchive.maa.org/hedi/HEDI-2009-02.pdf And I realised that Euler had found two formulae for Pi which can be used to calculate any hex digit of Pi. I wrote this up in a paper: "In 1779 Euler discovered two formulas for π which ca…