A less click-baity headline might be "17 year old Hannah Cairo has solved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture"
Is it an important conjecture, or just something someone came up with last week?
At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
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Re: At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
#52Wait, what software engineering jobs require you to move to the Bahamas?
Re: At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
#53> Only the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University were willing to welcome her straight into a doctoral program. She’ll start at Maryland in the fall. When she finishes, it will be her first degree. Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities. She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it!
> Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities. There’s a modern phenomenon I’ve been thinking about but have struggled to put a name to. Everything just becomes so generalized, streamlined that it becomes impossible to operate outside of the pre defined “happy path”. AI will make this increase 100x as taking humans out of the loop seems to accelerate this process.
Perhaps the term "canalization" fits? Coined by C.H. Waddington, describing the process of forming a chreode in a homeorhetic system. But it doesn't really encompass the "everything becomes overly generalized" concept you mentioned. Rather, it's more about robustness against perturbation of a trajectory in a conceptual space. Christopher Alexander called them 'paths in configuration space'.
Re: At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
#54As a pupil of Dijkstra and seeing at least some rise in formal verification because of the modern tooling and as a follower of Lean (and Agda, Coq, Idris* etc), I hope it will be at least a strive to deliver parts of proofs in code verifiable form. More machine verifiable building blocks will lead to a bettering of everything.
Offtopic, but I am 17 too just like Hannah Cairo but nothing too groundbreaking till now I suppose and it absolutely brings me delight that I can talk to somebody who was a pupil of Dijkstra,
I have heard a lot about dijkstra's algorithm's and I had forgotten about it and so I searched it right now, but the only thing I knew is that it is pretty popular algorithm.
If I had to ask you kind sir, what would be the biggest life lesson (in coding, or anything general) that you could give me be?
Re: At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
#55> Only the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University were willing to welcome her straight into a doctoral program. She’ll start at Maryland in the fall. When she finishes, it will be her first degree. Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities. She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it!
> what a damning indictment of today's Universities.
Prodigy skips undergrad -> Universities are doomed? What?
Re: At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
#56I find the Soviet idea of Math Circles so interesting and important. I bought books on the subject, but it's difficult to implement for your own children only. Nothing beats it like having an actual one, run by math teachers and in your city.
Re: At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
#57This is the most impressive thing I've seen in years.
Re: At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
#58Re: At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
#59Wait, what software engineering jobs require you to move to the Bahamas?
In my experience, online gambling or banking.
Re: At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s one of the biggest problems? Not pushing people into higher educational programs with little societal or economic value but huge loads of debt?
I think research and higher education does have value for the most part. It's undergrad that's really worthless and something people only do for the experience.
Indeed. I've long felt that most undergrad students would be better served by a typical college minus the formal classes. Basically dorms and all the other amenities found in a typical college campus, where you mainly gain life skills and mingle with other people your age. Because most people I met at an average 4-year school were there because it's a societal expectation among certain classes, it's less scary than just getting a job and figuring out life completely on your own, and it is 10x-100x easier to make friends at college than just "out in the world." Not on the list: to learn from college classes, which at an average school teach you less than you'd get from a $200 a year subscription to Great Courses Plus or Brilliant. Or free from Khan Academy.
I know a few very special schools give undergrads access to brilliant minds in their field, but I also have been told that undergrads at those schools are mostly taught by grad students, so I'm not sure that Ivies provide a lot either, beyond the opportunity to hobnob with the legacies that will be running Goldman Sachs in 20 years.