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Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#71

Post by emmelaich »

webwanderings wrote: post #31

This is such a great quote for everyone! No matter the age. No matter what one wants to do. > “I’m not able to learn mathematics easily,” Talagrand tells ... “I have to work. It takes a very long time and I have a terrible memory. I forget things. So I try to work, despite handicaps, and the way I worked was trying to understand really well the simple things. Really, really well, in complete detail. And that turned o…

A bit reminiscent of John Carmack's method too; not only does he work for 10 hours a day (preferably uninterrupted) he also secretes himself away at some random location for a week at a time.

It's not the same, I know, but to remember things you have to establish and remember entire trains of thought. Not just remember individual milestones.

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#73

Post by uptownfunk »

kwant_kiddo wrote: post #7
mr_mitm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who don't know, Quanta Magazine is financed by Jim Simons (from Chern-Simons theory) who became known as a very successful hedge fund manager. I just love the idea that he's using a portion of his billions to fund a little non-profit math magazine.

it is a shame they don't do physical print through

A physical magazine would be nice. I just print papers out on my printer these days and mark em up with my pen of choice :)

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#74

Post by uptownfunk »

My problem was always I took on too much so I had surprising breadth. I could find connections between many areas. I wish I had just focused on one or two things and gone very very deep. I would probably be a more fulfilled academic today if I was able to do that instead of an engineering manager.

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#75

Post by appplication »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #49
haolez wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a college friend that's super slow to learn. He would always get behind on classes and would not even get passing grades most of the time. But! When he finally learned something new, he would never forget it. He would remember it in details, both the whys and the hows. I've always admired his skill.

I’m like this. I barely graduated school and failed out of college in the first year with a GPA whose square root was higher than the actual GPA. I had always been placed in accelerated classes only to be kicked out once I fell behind. I needed time to understand things, but in all modesty once I understand something I seem to understand it better than everyone around me. Until then though my mind is blank and I lite…

I am a similar learner, though not quite the same. Mostly for me it’s a focus thing. If I’m focused in, I learn very quickly, but if not, I fall behind hopelessly. College lectures were next to impossible for me, as I had such a hard time focusing, ended up in academic probation and managed to turn it around enough to graduate.

Years later, I went back and got my MS online. That was incredible. Recorded lectures meant I could pause and rewind when I lost focus. I really enjoyed my classes because now the most stressful part of it was no longer an issue.

It’s incredible our entire public school system is based on the assumption every student learns things in the same way at the same rate.

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#76

Post by lukan »

sobriquet9 wrote: post #58
cout wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you learned history as a set of facts then you did not learn history. History is about the connections between those facts and the overarching story. Science is also taught as a set of facts to be memorized, but that is also not science. In both science and history, the most important question is not "what do you know?" but "how do you know?".

If history was about making the connections, those connections could be used to make predictions that could be tested.

You can, but the world is still an chaotic place, so making a forcast on human geopolitics, is like making a weather forecast. Likely valid for the next days, but increasingly bad for longer timeframes.

But one can make for example the prediction that the war in Ukraine will be going on for a little bit longer.

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#77

Post by lukan »

analog31 wrote: post #47
cout wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved math in school and was even on the state math team. Sadly much of the math I learned in high school and even college I had to unlearn (the worst example being assuming everything is a normal distribution and reporting mean and standard deviation instead of looking at a histogram).

I'm convinced that the best way to teach stats is to start people with data and graphing. The formal mathematics of statistics is certainly a fascinating discipline (my grandfather was a professor of statistics) but for the rest of us, the formulas are a work-around to the problem of dealing directly with the data and doing repetitive calculations by hand. The formulas and proofs are certainly valuable, but could com…

"Also, data and graphing would be a way to ease students into programming."

Yes! And have them collect some real world data in biology, or sociology first and suddenly you have education, that is not abstract and dry anymore.

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#78

Post by fnordpiglet »

appplication wrote: post #75
fnordpiglet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m like this. I barely graduated school and failed out of college in the first year with a GPA whose square root was higher than the actual GPA. I had always been placed in accelerated classes only to be kicked out once I fell behind. I needed time to understand things, but in all modesty once I understand something I seem to understand it better than everyone around me. Until then though my mind is blank and I lite…

I am a similar learner, though not quite the same. Mostly for me it’s a focus thing. If I’m focused in, I learn very quickly, but if not, I fall behind hopelessly. College lectures were next to impossible for me, as I had such a hard time focusing, ended up in academic probation and managed to turn it around enough to graduate. Years later, I went back and got my MS online. That was incredible. Recorded lectures mean…

But how can it scale if it doesn’t assume that? It really has to cater to some statistical center of gravity and at some point cut off the outliers. Otherwise you need to pay for a private education because essentially you’re asking for custom tailored schooling. The fact that my parents couldn’t afford private schooling is no one’s fault - I don’t blame the public school system for things being the way things are honestly despite the level of abject misery I felt in it. In fact I’m a huge fan of it - I learned more than I would have without it and value the fact that everyone no matter how poor gets access to it.

Some public schools try to do differentiation but it’s really expensive and impractical at scale. The quality of teacher, resources, and teacher training required if very high. I think every effort to try is worth doing, but the more you try without increasing the amount of funding, training, and selectivity in teacher hiring (which is impractical given the scarcity of high quality teachers relative to the population size) the worse you do for everyone.

I don’t agree vouchers and school choice helps this fwiw. The issues don’t go away by diffusing administration of schools to more organizations, you just end up spending a lot more tax payer money on a lot more administrative staff at a lot more schools with a lot less focus on that center of mass outcome.

The reality is despite how intolerable my childhood was I found my way - and I know many who do. People are resilient and overcome adversity all the time in many shapes.

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#79

Post by hackerman14 »

aaplok wrote: post #12
lukan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose for that to happen, the world needs better math lessons in school. Most have allmost traumatic experiences, so they now don't want to know anything about math at all. (I also only started to enjoy math, when I could apply it with programming, before it was not traumatic, but mostly boring, but we also did not cover any fun parts like Mandelbrot etc)

I'm always very confused by this. Why are maths lessons more traumatic than, say, history or biology or foreign language lessons? I mean learning lists of irregular verbs is not precisely most people's idea of fun. And yet only about maths do people speak with such dramatic language. There must be something beyond what's happening in schools themselves that makes people react this way. I just can't work out what it i…

Math is used as an IQ filter in the education system so even the people who are capable of it develop a hate for it.

The math department at my university was viewed very negatively because of this. People doing CS prerequisites and whatnot knew that they weren't there to learn but just to pass a glorified IQ test.

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#80

Post by analog31 »

lukan wrote: post #77
analog31 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm convinced that the best way to teach stats is to start people with data and graphing. The formal mathematics of statistics is certainly a fascinating discipline (my grandfather was a professor of statistics) but for the rest of us, the formulas are a work-around to the problem of dealing directly with the data and doing repetitive calculations by hand. The formulas and proofs are certainly valuable, but could com…

"Also, data and graphing would be a way to ease students into programming." Yes! And have them collect some real world data in biology, or sociology first and suddenly you have education, that is not abstract and dry anymore.

I agree, but have to caution that the abstract and dry stuff is still part of math. It was what turned me on to math. I'd favor a blending of math and science curricula, and use more data analysis when teaching science.

It's a dilemma because math is so broad, and has both pure and applied sides. And a challenge for changing curricula is that the public defines "math" as the precise sequence of topics that they studied in school (and hated).

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