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What do grad students in math do all day?

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Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#71

Post by chris_wot »

Speaking of vacuum cleaners, Stephen Pile, my very much favourite author ever, wrote an entry in his hilarious Book of Heroic Failures about the man who almost invented the vacuum cleaner. I reproduce it here verbatim, under the principles of fair use (transformative, educational, not for profit and a tiny amount of his work that won't impinge on his profits - buy his book!)

The Man Who Almost Invented The Vacuum Cleaner

The man officially credited with inventing the vacuum cleaner is Hubert Cecil Booth. However, he got the idea from a man who almost invented it.

In 1901 Booth visited a London music-hall. On the bill was an American inventor with his wonder machine for removing dust from carpets. The machine comprised a box about one foot square with a bag on top.

After watching the act -- which made everyone in the front six rows sneeze -- Booth went round to the inventor's dressing room.

"It should suck not blow," said Booth, coming straight to the point. "Suck?", exclaimed the enraged inventor. "Your machine just moves the dust around the room," Booth informed him. "Suck? Suck? Sucking is not possible," was the inventor's reply and he stormed out. Booth proved that it was by the simple expedient of kneeling down, pursing his lips and sucking the back of an armchair. "I almost choked," he said afterwards.

---

There's a story here somewhere that aught to relate to mathematics, if only I could find it...

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#72

Post by chris_wot »

VLM wrote: post #69
iliis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, my cat gets scared to death by a vacuum cleaner. She darts out of the room as soon as it's turned on.

Its the motor noise. Once the cat is 20 years old and totally deaf (depends on breed...), I can verify the cat will love the vacuum cleaner. It feels like being brushed and massaged at the same time. I'm surprised day spas don't do this to humans. Needless to say this is using the hose and brush attachment, not the carpet beater.

If the nozzle is too large, or the cat too skinny, it risks getting sucked into the machine. Fair enough the cat is scared. Cats don't do math either. Well, perhaps Schrödinger taught his cat, but I hear it had a sticky end. Nobody is really sure.

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#73

Post by devb »

SilasX wrote: post #61
wheaties wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. After doing 2 years I left with a masters and never looked back. What is even scarier than the minuscule contributions you might make is the few that have done anything but minuscule. Those people are amazingly smart. By the way, cats do like vacuums... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCzkm2z4-6g

If they're so smart, why aren't they any better at bringing newcomers up to speed?

It's the newcomers' faults, clearly.

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#74

Post by not-gro-tsen »

As a math professor, I was enthusiastic when I read this short piece in Math Horizons, and promptly put it on my office door. The metaphor is a great hook, is well carried out, and leaves the reader with a pretty much spot-on idea of what math research is all about. I am delighted to see it reach a wider audience on the web.

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#75

Post by BrianEatWorld »

army wrote: post #39
graycat wrote: post #19

Yes, when as a math grad student I saw some of that, I developed some opinions and ideas to look for more productive approaches. Somewhere I read: "There is a famous recipe for rabbit stew that starts out, 'First catch a rabbit'.", and I changed that to, "There is a recipe for how to do applied mathematics, first get an application.". For more, commonly the main criteria for 'research' is that it be "new, correct, an…

Mathematizing a fields is a bit of a double edged sword though and I think needs a great deal of skepticism and caution. Yes, if you do it right you can get insights and prove things more rigorously. If you do it wrong, the mathematics can easily become divorced from reality: it really does require ongoing skepticism and awareness of the connection between whatever mathematical abstractions you've built and reality.…

Excellent observation. In many ways, mathematization has killed many branches of not just academic economics, but practical economics as well. Just look at how many failed policies in the past were driven by the false assumption that if we change X by so many units, such and such economic indicator will move by Y.

Re: What do grad students in math do all day?

#76

Post by SilasX »

omaranto wrote: post #63
SilasX wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're so smart, why aren't they any better at bringing newcomers up to speed?

Some thing are hard no matter how you try to explain them. There's lots of stuff that seems to require working through it yourself to understand.

Oh, I don't disagree; some topics are inherently intractable. It's just that, in all my experiences, the numbers are more like 1 truly intractable topic for every thousand that some expert will mistakenly claim is intractable simply because they haven't put the effort into tracing out the connections to other topics.

The woman top row of this xkcd pretty much sums up my life:

http://xkcd.com/566/

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