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Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize

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Re: Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize

#41

Post by tanderson92 »

graycat wrote: post #28
cadeira wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I never suspected that just digging into questions that were fun and curious and maybe someday somewhat useful, making discoveries, and writing papers could be a career that could support a family. I am interested in pursuing a PhD in Pure Mathematics. What are the career prospects for it? Based on what I read academic prospects don't seem too thrilling. It appears you may have to do multiple post-docs at low pay, a…

> What are the career prospects for it? I typed in a comment rejected as too long, clicked on the wrong icon, and lost it. My view of the prospects is, in a word, poor. Others have described the prospects for an academic math career. I would add, should include a lot of politics, friends, alliances, etc. Outside of academics, long the main source of jobs in math was in US national security, with some of the major com…

> The industrialized countries are already so poor that the birth rates are so low they are rapidly going extinct.

Country wealth and birth rates are not positively correlated, and due to immigration, countries can have positive population growth even as their birth rate is below replacement.

> For Wall Street, I still have the letter back from Fisher Black at Goldman Sachs saying that he saw no opportunities for optimization on Wall Street. I sent lots of resume copies, went on a few interviews, had not yet heard of James Simons, and got nothing.

To conclude from this, despite everything that has happened in the interim, that math is unemployable is an, uhm, mistake. As I recall, President Obama was lamenting the brain drain to Wall Street speaking precisely of the number of math PhDs lured there from more fruitful pursuits. Not to mention, as I recall there is an equation bearing Mr. Black's name, the accurate/efficient solution of which has had some importance in finance.

Re: Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize

#42

Post by selimthegrim »

marai2 wrote: post #27

The closest I will every get to something like an Erdõs number is that I can now claim the one and only female Abel prize winner was my Differential Equations teacher at college! I missed taking a class with Steven Weinberg when I got to UT because he semi-retired the year before.

There is a story around UT that Weinberg heckled her during a lecture of his when she asked about the convergence of a series and promptly got a talking-to by the department chair. I hear he’s been much better behaved since.

Re: Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize

#43

Post by klyrs »

msla wrote: post #34
otoburb wrote: post #2

"Mathematics research had another feature that appealed to her at the time: It is something you can work on in solitude, if you wish. In her early life, she said in 1997, “I regarded anything to do with people as being sort of a horrible profession.”" This sentence struck me as slightly odd if only because Erdõs was renowned for his social approach to mathematics[1], and my layperson's understanding of mathematics de…

> Erdõs Where is his name spelled like this?

Umm... everywhere? It often gets anglicized to "Erdos" but the correct spelling is Erdős.

Re: Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize

#44

Post by hyperbovine »

throwawaymath wrote: post #24
hyperbovine wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erdos is renowned precisely because he was so out of the ordinary.

Erdos wasn't out of the ordinary because he published with (read: collaborated with) so many coauthors. He was out of the ordinary because he published so many papers , period. His sociability was more of a difference of degree within mathematics, not category.

I beg to differ. Anecdotes of Erdos' itinerant lifestyle are legendary in the field:

> Dr. Erdos traveled from meeting to meeting, carrying a half-empty suitcase and staying with mathematicians wherever he went. His colleagues took care of him, lending him money, feeding him, buying him clothes and even doing his taxes. In return, he showered them with ideas and challenges -- with problems to be solved and brilliant ways of attacking them. (https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/24/us/paul-erdos-83-a-wayfar...)

Even in the rarefied club of oddball math personalities, he stood out.

Re: Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize

#45

Post by graycat »

selimthegrim wrote: post #39
graycat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the tuition should be much lower than it is. Net, student tuition and state taxes at state universities are paying for a lot of research.

Student tuition, maybe. State taxes, no. Do you suggest that people should just move directly to government supported private research institutes?

I'm questioning the role of student tuition and state taxes supporting academic research. The big support of academic research was after The Bomb and then during the Cold War. Congress, for purposes of US national security, arranged that the best research universities would receive an offer they couldn't refuse -- accept the money for STEM field research, keep 60% for overhead, the English department, the string quartet series, etc., and otherwise have research and teaching grad students. If can't get US students, then try Taiwan and India.

So, in effect, yes: If Congress wants to fund research, then they should fund research institutes.

I just don't like student tuition or state tax money funding STEM field research.

There are research institutions: JPL, Brookhaven, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, SLAC, Fermi Lab, NIH in Bethesda, ....

Re: Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize

#46

Post by graycat »

tanderson92 wrote: post #41
graycat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the career prospects for it? I typed in a comment rejected as too long, clicked on the wrong icon, and lost it. My view of the prospects is, in a word, poor. Others have described the prospects for an academic math career. I would add, should include a lot of politics, friends, alliances, etc. Outside of academics, long the main source of jobs in math was in US national security, with some of the major com…

> The industrialized countries are already so poor that the birth rates are so low they are rapidly going extinct. Country wealth and birth rates are not positively correlated, and due to immigration, countries can have positive population growth even as their birth rate is below replacement. > For Wall Street, I still have the letter back from Fisher Black at Goldman Sachs saying that he saw no opportunities for opt…

The industrialized countries are poor in a special, curious sense: The people are so eager to get financial security that motherhood is neglected. Or, when wives have to go to work for financial security, the country is still poor. In a sense, living in some of the tropical countries is better if only because can get by without heating oil in the winter or an expensive car.

Yes, Black-Scholes etc. have been important, were for a while via "covered call options", or as in the E. Thorpe, Beat the Street -- essentially the same as what Black-Scholes did the math for with a Brownian motion assumption, etc.

I got an interview at Morgan-Stanley, gave a little lecture on my recent work in anomaly detection, indicated that I wanted to work in developing applied math, algorithms, and software for automated trading, but was ignored. They just wanted people to hack code for back office record keeping. The money making was elsewhere in the company and was based on more traditional ideas, e.g., investment banking.

For automated trading, listen to a James Simons remark: Someone walks in and is just convinced that they should short GM and go long the German Mark or some such. Well, that's more traditional stock picking or hedge fund portfolio management, and Simons made clear that his group, no way, would ever do such a thing. Instead, each buy/sell decision was from some data, ideas, analysis, and software already thoroughly tested; when that software said buy/sell, there wasn't much doubt. Well, that's what Simons did. Don't expect many other people on Wall Street ever to have done such a thing -- it's a lot easier to have a gut feel to short GM and go long the Mark.

Lawyers have learned: A working lawyer reports only to another lawyer. Well, math guys need such a rule, but outside of academics and some national security shops, there are nearly no math guys to report to. So, my desire to do applied math, software, etc. for automated trading was just ignored. Once I was invited to lunch in lower Manhattan for a guy claiming to be recruiting for Goldman-Sachs .... There just is no respect for a mathematician on Wall Street, no matter what Obama said.

Other than James Simons, not clear that math made much money for anyone on Wall Street.

Re: Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize

#47

Post by keldaris »

andrepd wrote: post #33
graycat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting to read what she saw in math, why she liked it. For me, I just thought it would be useful, especially for physics which I thought was even more useful! No one ever explained to me how a career in academic math research would work: I never suspected that just digging into questions that were fun and curious and maybe someday somewhat useful, making discoveries, and writing papers could be a career th…

>None of my undergrad physics profs knew either general relativity or quantum mechanics at all well. This is very odd. How can a physics professor not know undergraduate physics material?

Only knowing the undergrad version of those topics would not count as knowing them "well" by any reasonable metric.

Re: Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize

#48

Post by graycat »

andrepd wrote: post #33
graycat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting to read what she saw in math, why she liked it. For me, I just thought it would be useful, especially for physics which I thought was even more useful! No one ever explained to me how a career in academic math research would work: I never suspected that just digging into questions that were fun and curious and maybe someday somewhat useful, making discoveries, and writing papers could be a career th…

>None of my undergrad physics profs knew either general relativity or quantum mechanics at all well. This is very odd. How can a physics professor not know undergraduate physics material?

They knew how to teach freshman physics, knew some engineering level E&M without actually writing down Maxwell's equations, and did some research in infrared optics.

My guess is that there are a lot of experimental physicists who are not at all clear on Fourier series/transforms, the wave equation, good proofs of Stokes theorem, the actual definition of Hilbert space, Bell's inequality, or the differential geometry for general relativity. Still fewer know the exterior algebra of differential forms.

Re: Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize

#50

Post by volkadav »

marai2 wrote: post #27

The closest I will every get to something like an Erdõs number is that I can now claim the one and only female Abel prize winner was my Differential Equations teacher at college! I missed taking a class with Steven Weinberg when I got to UT because he semi-retired the year before.

I felt very lucky to have had her for an experimental mathematical modeling course (M375) back around 2000. She was simply delightful as a professor, even for a mathematical lummox like myself. :) Encouraging, informative, brilliant ... we should all be so lucky as to have teachers and influences like her in our lives.
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