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Terry Tao's generals (2012)

web.math.princeton.edu

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Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#41

Post by svat »

fiforpg wrote: post #18

My first distracted thought upon reading this title on HN: cool, Terry Tao is finally getting his own army! Jokes aside, Tao also has a nice write-up in AMS Notices on this experience and how it influenced his career: https://www.ams.org/notices/202007/rnoti-p1007.pdf

That AMS article ("A Close Call: How a Near Failure Propelled Me to Succeed") is great and sobering. I am sure it has helped some people, by showing that even Terence Tao cannot succeed without working hard.

> this was the first time I had performed poorly on an exam that I was genuinely interested in performing well in. But it served as an important wake-up call and a turning point in my career. I began to take my classes and studying more seriously. I listened more to my fellow students and other faculty, and I cut back on my gaming. I worked particularly hard on all of the problems that my advisor gave me […] In retrospect, nearly failing the generals was probably the best thing that could have happened to me at the time.

See also https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/ which among other things links to "Work hard": https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#42

Post by vietvu »

alkibiades wrote: post #30

so has he accomplished anything big/groundbreaking other than being a child prodigy and having a high iq? serious question. i only know his name for being smart. not anything specific

Being a great mathematicians not all about solving Millennium Prize Problems or being a household name like Einstein.

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#43

Post by I_AM_A_SMURF »

OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #39
pfdietz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tao's blog is quite interesting.

I feel good about myself if I can understand more than the first sentence of any of his posts. Some days I'll even settle for only the first. Great mathematicians are said to be exceptional at visualization. I wonder if the modern greats think in TeX or LaTeX on top of that. It is amazing how fast they post fully-formed, meticulously referenced blog articles or upload preprints.

After a while writing LaTeX becomes second nature. I used to type my master's classes notes straight in LaTeX.

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#44

Post by wging »

alkibiades wrote: post #30

so has he accomplished anything big/groundbreaking other than being a child prodigy and having a high iq? serious question. i only know his name for being smart. not anything specific

Off the top of my head, two big accomplishments are compressed sensing and the existence of arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions in the primes (the Green-Tao Theorem, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green–Tao_theorem). But there is more than that. It’s a very googleable question.

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#46

Post by CraigRo »

First of all, nobody ever passed these exams with flying colors unless the examiners wanted that to happen or were having a bad day. Assume that there are three full professors testing you, and they have an average of 20 years each of post-graduate experience. That's 60 years of reading -- no way that a 2nd or 3rd year graduate student can keep up. Part of the process is humiliating the students a bit -- they did this for everyone.

They also had a language requirement, which was often fulfilled by memorizing the 500 most common words in a foreign language as well as 300-500 common math terms in that language; there was a library of prepared crib sheets for these. It was kind of a running joke in that it tested your ability to translate an article from German/Russian/French into English sufficiently well to explain it to a bored examiner, but most of the students kind of looked it as a kind of giant 'Wheel of Fortune' exercise in intelligently guessing between the revealed clues.

Second, some of the other graduate students basically went insane studying for this -- one locked himself in a room with a 30 day supply of microwavable meals, and another locked himself in his dorm and (having read MicroSerfs) only ate 2 dimensional food slipped under the door. A lot of this was immature students trying to out-do each other in commitment and probably didn't markedly improve pass rates.

Tao matured, but mostly because he got older -- there were finally reasonably smart people his age studying with him. He also used to hang out with John Conway a lot, and Conway was going through his own problems; he spent more time with the 'more conventionally normal' faculty and that probably rubbed off.

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#47

Post by zach »

krackers wrote: post #4
ajtulloch wrote: post #3

There’s a big long list of these in https://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/ , not just Tao’s.

Bhargava's one is fun to read: https://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/bhargava_manjul

I noticed that Evan O’Dorney’s generals was chaired by Bhargava and this question was asked:

  What is Brauer's theorem?
    [I had no idea and they moved on]
He clearly should have read Bhargava’s generals, where Andrew Wiles asks Bhargava the same question!

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#48

Post by fsckboy »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #19
OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #14

Thought this Oppenheimer anecdote may amuse the HN contingent. "Oppenheimer obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in March 1927 at age 23, supervised by Max Born.[28][29] After the oral exam, James Franck, the professor administering, reportedly said, "I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me."[30] " Franck had won the Nobel two years earlier. Sources: [Refs] quoted directly from Wikipedia artic…

I keep making this mistake. I almost asked "why philosophy, didn't he study physics?" That does make me wonder: why DOES the qualification/position/status name mention only philosophy?

Philosophy is the study of everything that is not well understood or is difficult to understand, even the study of study itself. A good way to think of it is, "philosophy exists only in the gaps", the gaps in our understanding. What is the nature of matter, can you take clay and keep dividing it in half and in half? When we didn't know the answer, only speculated about it, it was philosophy. Now that we know the answer, it's physics. But unknown answers in physics are still considered philosophy, such as whether or what would it mean if time can run backward.

This implies philosophy and philosophers will disappear once we know everything, which could by some be considered one of the rewards of this quest for truth.

BTW, many institutions today offer the ScD degree, doctor of science; it is generally equivalent to a PhD, though in some places it can be considered "higher"

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#49

Post by p-e-w »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #19
OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #14

Thought this Oppenheimer anecdote may amuse the HN contingent. "Oppenheimer obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in March 1927 at age 23, supervised by Max Born.[28][29] After the oral exam, James Franck, the professor administering, reportedly said, "I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me."[30] " Franck had won the Nobel two years earlier. Sources: [Refs] quoted directly from Wikipedia artic…

I keep making this mistake. I almost asked "why philosophy, didn't he study physics?" That does make me wonder: why DOES the qualification/position/status name mention only philosophy?

Because academics love to cling to outdated and today factually incorrect terminology, while arrogantly berating the general public when they do the same.

"Actually, it's not called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis anymore. The preferred term is 'linguistic relativity' now."

... while you keep using titles that have been nonsensical for 200 years. Got it.

Academia is 99% power games. The emperor wears no clothes.

Re: Terry Tao's generals (2012)

#50

Post by CaptainNegative »

fiforpg wrote: post #24
analog31 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These go by different names at different schools, but a grad student has to pass an oral exam, roughly at the end of their coursework and beginning of their dissertation phase. Sometimes called "orals," "comprehensive exams," etc. By tradition, they can ask you anything. But in practice, they're not out to kill you. I went to a second tier university, and it was generally believed that the questions at a top school t…

> Sometimes called "orals," "comprehensive exams," etc. — other names I have heard people use for these: prelims, quals, ...

"Prelim" also sometimes refers to an exam taken shortly after entering a PhD program to ensure you belong there.

One of the grad schools I attended had both a written "prelim" in year 1 and an oral "qual" in year 2/3. The other just had an oral "general" in year 2.

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