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Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

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

#291

Post by boringg »

weweweoo wrote: post #238
FeepingCreature wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally I loved history, social science and geography, but none of that has been useful in working life. Being good at mathematics is prerequisite for nearly all well-paying jobs, humanities are not of much use except for being able to write and read well.

Remember that school isn't only about acquiring skills to leverage your lifetime earnings. Education is about understanding and learning the world as a whole. So understanding humanities history the land that we live in and everything else under the sun is important.

Imagine that all we were was measured by the salary that we make and not humans and human civilization. Might as well just hand over our lives to the robots now.

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

#292

Post by gen_greyface »

cubefox wrote: post #276
gen_greyface wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

caste system in india is an evil that persists even today, and is a complex topic. majority of the indian-origin users on hackernews or people in the IT community are very likely upper castes. see [1] If you are interested to learn more about the caste system in india it is recommended to get your facts from multiple sources. start from [2] [1] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674987883 [2] https://en.wikipedia.…

[flagged]

I fail to see why this is being pointed out?

> People from a higher caste tend to have higher IQ,

>> People from a higher caste tend to have better access to resources,

also a >Mankind Quarterly, a known fringe Far-right Racist publication.

for fellow readers see [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mankind_Quarterly

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

#293

Post by throw4847285 »

babyent wrote: post #5

That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…

There is an Isaiah Berlin essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox. In it he divides artists/philosophers into two categories: foxes and hedgehogs. It is inspired by a fragment of ancient Greek poetry which reads, "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing." In other words, some great thinkers looked at the world through the lens of one big idea, and others can't be easily reduced.

Two major caveats. The first is that Berlin never wanted the essay to be taken all that seriously. To him, it was an intellectually parlor game. But if TvTropes is any indication, people are addicted to classifying things into simplistic categories, so the fox and hedgehog game took off.

Second, the rest of the essay actually challenges the binary by focusing on Leo Tolstoy, an unimaginably creative thinker and writer who, according to Berlin, was a fox by nature but wanted to be a hedgehog.

Why did I share all of that? Well, without taking the categories too seriously I do think some people are more foxy by nature and others are more hedgehog-esque. I've always thought of myself as a fox (which to be honest, might limit me), and I had no interest in focusing on a single subject in school. At worst, I'm a dilettante who can have a surface level conversation about any intellectual topic at a party. At best, I can muster up a real enthusiasm about trying something entirely new.

I say all this not just because I'm running on 4 hours of sleep, but also because I think foxes get a bad rap. Not everybody should strive to be Ramanujan, because it isn't in everybody's temperament.

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

#296

Post by ben_w »

scotty79 wrote: post #249
tallanvor wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very immature take. Of course you can BELIEVE that English classes didn't help you learn how to read and write more effectively or how to better understand what was left unsaid or unwritten, but believing something doesn't make it so. And yes, as a student reading the classics often sucks. After all, you're not reading them for pleasure - you're reading them to learn how to identify and discuss their themes…

It's very impolite to label lived experience of another educated and probably somewhat accomplished adult as immature. At 45 years old I can confidently say that anything I've "learned" on my native language classes through 12 years of having them was totally useless garbage and I'm using none of it in my writing, reading and culturural appreciation or understanding of the world. Everything I use was self-acquired in…

40, and I concur.

Even if the goal is a cultural appreciation, Shakespeare's plays will tell you as much about England in 1585-1613 as Terry Gilliam's filmography does about the Anglosphere in 1971-present.

It's more than zero, but it's also missing the overwhelming majority of the context and the world in which it exists.

Modern readings treat Shakespeare with excessive reverence: not just "a playwright" but "The Bard".

Those plays were made to be performed with very short rehearsal time before performing, outside, with no lights (at most fire, but it was wood and thatched and burned down from a theatrical cannon), in a crowded venue where audiences would be expected to jeer and cheer, whereas today it's a finely rehearsed performance by people who take it seriously performed for an audience who consider it high culture.

Monty Python's Gumbies aren't well understood by new viewer today, as modern news treats "the man on the street" somewhat differently than in the 70s. How wrong do modern viewers comprehend Shakespeare's characters, considering that "The Taming of the Shrew" is classified as a comedy?

That said, I was also busy teaching myself a lot of maths and science ahead of the classes; what I learned from school but would not have taught myself was the basics of German and French (though only the former stuck with me), the absolute basics of music notation, some metalworking and woodworking, and PE.

Oh, and the practical experiences in the chemistry lab, though I'd have still done the theory myself without that.

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

#297

Post by bluecalm »

circlefavshape wrote: post #256
scotty79 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading and writing is a huge part of software development. But I didn't learn these skills at school. If anything, school soured them for me, by making me read things I didn't want to read and writing things I didn't want to write. School should let you read what you want. Today that you read it could be checked with AI prepared quiz. And writing should be mostly focused on communication not essays. Very small fract…

> making me read things I didn't want to read and writing things I didn't want to write How to do things you don't want to do is a fundamental requirement for adulthood, and probably the most important skill anyone learns in school

That may be your experience. In such case I feel for you. For me doing things I don't want to do take less than an hour a day for my whole adult life. During school it was more like 11 (including going there, homework, other related chores). I hate school system with passion and I feel it was the worst thing that happened to me. I would be better off wandering the streets and getting access to a library.

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

#298

Post by bonzini »

trgn wrote: post #279
bonzini wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is high school for? Also does the above apply also to the most selective and renowned institutions, or only to community colleges?

High school is preparing to be able to do a college education? A bachelor's isn't that trivial most of the time. I'd say applies to most colleges, of any size. Community colleges tend to be more like trade schools

In Europe high school is when you get a generic education, and in college you choose your topic. So if you are a languages major you'll have no more math, if you're a STEM major you'll have no more history, if you're a philosophy major you might have logic and some history but no physics or linear algebra, and so on.

I studied computer science (M.Eng.) and I had to provide an English certification as a foreign language, but that was it. The only non-computer science, non-math, non-electronics courses were one semester of chemistry, one of economics and three of physics (which you could say is related to electronics though). So basically 15-20%.

Having to study more history or biology would have been a huge waste of time in a CS university, and I say that as someone who did more Latin and Greek than math and physics in high school.

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

#299

Post by dyauspitr »

chompychop wrote: post #195
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.

You’re right, I can’t edit my comment anymore though.

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

#300

Post by DragonStrength »

nordsieck wrote: post #12
babyent wrote: post #5

That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…

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.

The miss, which in my state has changed recently, was kicking kids out eventually who failed one subject but were succeeding in others. Sure, that kid isn't going to an Ivy League school, but there's value in finding ways to make up for what they aren't getting versus producing a high school dropout with bleak prospects in today's society.
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