10 ms·

As a counterpoint to the overly exuberant article let me chime in as a graduating theoretical computer scientist. Math is hard and despite its beauty and allure

by 110011 10y ago

As a counterpoint to the overly exuberant article let me chime in as a graduating theoretical computer scientist. Math is hard and despite its beauty and allure academic life doesn't take place in a vacuum- ergo there's a lot of politics and pettiness from your peers. You should expect to invest years of your life into making progress on some hard problem with little encouragement in the meantime, this takes a tremendous toll on the mind and not for someone who falls easy prey to self doubt. Sometimes even after you publish your top result that took a lot out of you, it may take many years before people appreciate, let alone understand, your work- the vast majority of papers are never going to be read. To compensate for this horrible feedback mechanism you need to basically play the popularity game and try to give many talks and talk up your result when you meet people, so there's a lot of salesmanship involved here as well. So the career path of a junior scientist is pretty crushing mentally and I couldn't stomach it in the long run. In an ideal world I might have continued in academia but the career path is so twisted you have to either be insanely good (at math and at managing time) or just hate yourself enough to sacrifice your best years working essentially in the metaphorical darkness well outside the spotlight and most likely alone and poorly paid.

cryoshon 10y ago
>So the career path of a junior scientist is pretty crushing mentally this is true throughout the sciences. it's a big issue.
- searine 10y ago
  Do you think it's the culture of science or the inherent uncertainty? From my own experience I think it's the latter. Jumping off the edge of human knowledge and hoping there was a result to catch my fall was very mentally taxing. Not many other careers force you to grabble with the uncertainty of creating knowledge, and I think it takes a toll.
  - Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y ago
    The uncertainty of investigation pales to the uncertainty of funding. The former is a thrill to many, and the latter is at best a chore for all.
  - bpchaps 10y ago
    This has been my experience with trying to get a foothold in the technical civics communities, so I don't think it's either. I've found that the bar gets set pretty high by folks who are willing to speak loudly about their accomplishments in a ways that exaggerate the actual accomplishments. If you're not really good sales person towards your own work, you find yourself working significantly harder than what's probably needed since fewer people are willing to work with someone who hasn't had any accomplishments. It really sucks that ego and salesmanship gets in the way of trying to do civics work.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ndh2 10y ago
That's not a counterpoint, that is exactly the point. Maybe it becomes clearer if you read the speech. Math is hard, but it's being made much, much harder than it has to be.
- ianai 10y ago
  I miss being able to study mathematics every day. It blows my mind how something so critical to modern society can be so undervalued.
- jerf 10y ago
  What's the alternative? I mean that seriously, not sarcastically or in a defeatist way; try to explore what the alternative might actually be. On the one hand, academia has become rather harsh and intimidating and there is room for all kinds of improvement. On the other hand... there is no world where whoever just wants to study math can just go study whatever they want for as long as they want, regardless of how well they do it. Of course, when I spell it out, that probably seems obvious, but I suspect this may be the unexamined assumption in a lot of people's heads.
  - jgamman 10y ago
    "there is no world" - wasn't that what University was like before the 80s and still is in many other countries? minimal fees and some casual work and you can stay for as long as you can stand the conditions of the average student flat ;-) I think you are conflating the reality of your current culture with what was/is in other cultures.
    - jerf 10y ago
      If what you describe was even remotely the case, which I don't know, then there was some other filter in place preventing "everybody" from doing it. I can tell, because not "everybody" did. Plus I suspect you missed my "regardless of how well they do it" clause. I doubt that you can flunk every math class over and over and just keep attending. Loopholes that big get noticed, exploited, and closed very quickly.
Balgair 10y ago
Chiming in from Bio: Yep, this is true here too. I can't find the citations right now, but there was a recent study done through Elsiver's website. The group got a hold of the servers for Elsiver and took a look at page views. They wanted to know what the rates of papers being read was. It was... disheartening. They found that ~46% (again, not sure here as I can't find the source) of papers will never be looked at outside of the authors, reviewers, and the editors. The articles are not only never downloaded, but the pages are never even loaded. The stats were, to me, confusing, but hey that is what peer review is for. Still, if you take this paper (that I can't find now) to be true, ~half of all papers are effectively lecturing into the void. I admit, I drank a bit after reading that one.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y ago
  IIRC a lot of that has to do with spammy 'publication mill' journals. If you just look at 'decent' journals, the situation doesn't look nearly as dire.
  - FabHK 10y ago
    Elsevier is a despicable firm, but their journals are hardly publication mills, so not sure that response holds water.
    - Balgair 10y ago
      Yes, Elsevier is far from a journal mill designed to H-index hack your way up the credential ladder. They are scum, yes, but they are at least truthful.
      - nocoder 10y ago
        Maybe if Elsevier was open source & easily accessible more people would read it. I have tried reading many journal papers as a layman but in most cases got blocked by a pay wall. I dont like to rely on newspaper headline but like to go the source and because of paywall I get thwarted.
contravariant 10y ago
I don't think pursuing a career in academia was what he had in mind when he said 'do mathematics'. In fact he said specifically: >Teaching mathematics shouldn’t be about sending everybody to a Ph.D. program. That’s a very narrow view of what it means to do mathematics.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Doing serious research level mathematics (or any other science for that matter) is almost impossible outside academia. Doing serious work is hard and mentally draining. Mere mortals can't motivate themselves to do it unless the incentives align just right (i.e. being in academia). Also it takes all your time so forget about it if you have another job. I know this from personal experience. After I joined industry I thought I'll do physics research in my own time. In fact, I can't even keep myself up to date about current research. Most journal articles require a lot of effort to go through, and I don't have that kind of energy after a work day.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - srssays 10y ago
    That definition is circular. Of course research-level mathematics is done in academia, but there is a much larger field of applied mathematics that is done in industry.
    - xyzzyz 10y ago
      That stuff has very little to do with 90% of academia math. Also, if you specialized and are interested in a certain field of math, the barrier to switch to another field is enormous. On the other hand, 90% of the applied mathematics done in industry is much, much simpler, and very often a trivialized version of what you do in academia, so one could imagine switching to be possible, but what's the joy of doing that? (I have a MS in Math, my field was algebraic geometry. I considered a career in math research, but the industry was paying too well for it to be a reasonable)
cbsmith 10y ago
Yeah, I'd argue a very un-Good Will Hunting thing: if you can be convinced you suck at math, you probably should not pursue a career in academia in math. However... being a math major is really different from a career in academia. People really should be encouraged to major in math.
- kzisme 10y ago
  I would have to agree with this, but I disagree with out math is taught by most schools. Somewhere in this thread there is a link to Francis's lectures and they are wonderful. The method/enthusiasm be has for teaching is wonderful and makes all the difference to students. Rather than going through online courses and paying for them (many university classes are mostly online math problems, and proctored during a specific time.) EDIT: The way math is currently taught really forces people to dislike math and think they suck at it. (in general)
  - hutzlibu 10y ago
    "EDIT: The way math is currently taught really forces people to dislike math and think they suck at it. (in general)" Starting in primary school with basic arithmetik. (I help a young boy with his homework) They don't really teach them Math, how to solve thing, they tech them to memorize different algorithms, which they can handle after a while, but don't know what they are doing at all ... So the best mathematicians there are not the ones who can think best, but who can memorize and follow orders the best.
    - kzisme 10y ago
      I can see how that can work as well, but I would argue having a deeper understanding of the problem (whatever it may be) will benefit any mathematician/student in the long run.
      - hutzlibu 10y ago
        It works, if you don't want to think and just get results. But today there are calculators for that, so I'd like it if they teach them how to think, not to follow.
dalbasal 10y ago
Leaving aside the politics and economics, what do you think a better feedback mechanism might look like?
- 110011 10y ago
  Scientists actually spending more of their time reading others' work, communicating encouragingly and giving constructive criticism (anyone in academia has read more than a few hate filled reviews of their work), better pay (a postdoc at Oxford nets you a monthly salary after taxes of about 2.4k pounds), less focus on numbers and more on quality (a big reason why people don't read papers is because they're missing out on little by not doing so i.e., much of the work is incremental, unsurprising or just badly posed or ill motivated. instead focus must be given to quality and this must come from job hiring decisions which should reflect that science is not a numbers game, but the sad sad truth is it so very is). About the encouragement part, I felt let down many times by senior scientists by their uncaring and viciously competitive nature. All this does not need to be a part of academia. I think greater science can emerge after these structural problems are addressed. But currently the only people who rise to the top are the genuinely good ones and the ones who know how to game the numbers system. Idealists who come for the beauty of math often find themselves woefully unprepared to play all these other games in addition to doing good math.
spynxic 10y ago
> To compensate for this horrible feedback mechanism you need to basically play the popularity game Feedback needn't be a necessity in a work. Assessments and criticism will come if the work is essential, perhaps many years in the future.
- 110011 10y ago
  It sounds like you're not being sarcastic. So let me say that when you're working on something that almost surely has zero practical impact over the course of your lifetime, and the only possible benefit to society is the advancement of the state of our knowledge, a lack of enthusiasm from your peers can be gut wrenching no matter how mentally resilient you think you are. No one does math solely for appreciation from people they admire and respect, but the lack of it, even in the short term, can be very hard on a person.
- shoover 10y ago
  How many people can live like that in any practical sense? Everything I've ever read about motivation, learning, flow, and mastery holds quick and direct feedback as the most central necessity. Applied to software development, hence we prefer fast compilers over slow, unit tests over integration, working on a desktop over an SSH connection halfway around the world, frequent releases, etc.
vernie 10y ago
[0] baby! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law
clay_to_n 10y ago
We need to do better at cultivating interest in math, as well as other "hard" fields, among people who are normally excluded from the system. Su isn't as concerned with the amount of full-time mathematicians doing research work as he is the people who drop out far before that becomes an option. We should teach it better in high schools, and encourage more math undergraduates. Su isn't saying math is a great field free of problems, but he's arguing we should focus more on getting people further along that path, regardless of the stage where they drop out. I also think the problem you're referring to exists in most academic fields, and that the solution (if there is one) will probably have to be more general than just relate to math.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ZedDogX 10y ago
The academic system is kind of broke; how are we going to fix it?
unixhero 10y ago
Maybe I skimmed the article, but my takeaway from this article was that using our abilities to think and solve mathematical problems helps us to live a life of more intellectual resilience. In my view, this wasn't about doing mathematics as an academic career, climbing up the ivory tower, publish or perish, and all that. Edit: I tend to agree. My intellectual capacity was far improved only after doing first year Engineering Maths & Physics. I did terrible gradewise, but it has helped me visualize, juxtapose mental structures, quickly iterate on different concepts etc. I should go back to doing something again. Had to do some cartesian products in a data migration the other day, in my dayjob, it was refreshing :). And as always, this timeless quote from Einstein motivates "Do not worry too much about your difficulties in mathematics, I can assure you that mine are still greater."
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  > My intellectual capacity was far improved only after doing first year Engineering Maths & Physics. I did terrible gradewise, but it has helped me visualize, juxtapose mental structures, quickly iterate on different concepts etc. Same here, and thanks to the internet just remembering concepts is usually enough these days. Yesterday I had to quickly guestimate for a project how much space overhead we'd have on the server if we pre-generated an image pyramid of tiles for leaflet.js[0], instead of generating a "PNG" in RAM on the fly each time and serving that. Then I realised the number of pixels shrinks by a quarter every time we zoom out, so the worst case would be the infinite sum of 1/4^n. While I vaguely remember from my first year of physics how to calculate that, it's been over a decade. But we have Wolfram Alpha these days[0], which told me it converges on 4/3. So I knew the upper boundary would be around 4/3 of our original data, plus negligible PNG header overhead, and assuming compression is about the same. [0] http://leafletjs.com/ http://leafletjs.com/ [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+1%2F(4%5Ek) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+1%2F(4%5Ek)
- 0x445442 10y ago
  Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering with minors in Math and Physics here... While I can probably count on one hand the times I've used what I learned in the "real" world, I can say I really value my education. I believe the real value of a math based curriculum or even something like philosophy with an emphasis in logic is that it teaches one how to think in a reasoned, dispassionate and rational way.
cableshaft 10y ago
Wow, I always shied away from academics for similar reasons you mentioned, but I just realized that my main hobby, game development, parallels what you say a lot (and creative hobbies in general, including writing). "You should expect to invest years of your life into making progress on some meaningful game with little encouragement in the meantime...sometimes even after you release a game that took a lot out of you, it may take many years before people appreciate, let alone play, your game, and the vast majority of games aren't going to be played." "To compensate for this you basically play the popularity game and give as many interviews and talk up your game when you meet people, so there's a lot of salesmanship involved there as well." "The career path is so twisted you have to either be insanely good or just hate yourself enough to sacrifice your best years working essentially in the metaphorical darkness well outside the spotlight and most likely alone and poorly paid." <- My experience working in the game industry, except I wasn't completely alone, I did have coworkers. However I did feel like I never had time for a relationship.
dtornabene 10y ago
The article is about math, not necessarily academic math. And it was far from "overly exuberant". Jesus. I have no degree, and do math all the time, precisely for the reasons listed in the article. There endless comments shitting on academic life are obnoxious and tedious, they are also becoming something of a plauge here.
- 110011 10y ago
  Since I made this comment, I also had the chance to listen to his lecture in full. I couldn't agree more with him. What I wrote here was based on my understanding of what he meant by "doing mathematics", which as other commenters also pointed out earlier did not have anything to do with a career in math. I stand corrected.
  - dtornabene 10y ago
    Cool! Thanks for taking the time to circle back and add this. I was also responding to the wave of "academia sucks!!!", which, while perhaps true (for some) is getting really old to read in threads here. Appreciate you taking the time to add this comment.

by 110011 10y ago

cryoshon 10y ago

>So the career path of a junior scientist is pretty crushing mentally this is true throughout the sciences. it's a big issue.

searine 10y ago
Do you think it's the culture of science or the inherent uncertainty? From my own experience I think it's the latter. Jumping off the edge of human knowledge and hoping there was a result to catch my fall was very mentally taxing. Not many other careers force you to grabble with the uncertainty of creating knowledge, and I think it takes a toll.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y ago
  The uncertainty of investigation pales to the uncertainty of funding. The former is a thrill to many, and the latter is at best a chore for all.
- bpchaps 10y ago
  This has been my experience with trying to get a foothold in the technical civics communities, so I don't think it's either. I've found that the bar gets set pretty high by folks who are willing to speak loudly about their accomplishments in a ways that exaggerate the actual accomplishments. If you're not really good sales person towards your own work, you find yourself working significantly harder than what's probably needed since fewer people are willing to work with someone who hasn't had any accomplishments. It really sucks that ego and salesmanship gets in the way of trying to do civics work.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

ndh2 10y ago

That's not a counterpoint, that is exactly the point. Maybe it becomes clearer if you read the speech. Math is hard, but it's being made much, much harder than it has to be.

ianai 10y ago
I miss being able to study mathematics every day. It blows my mind how something so critical to modern society can be so undervalued.
jerf 10y ago
What's the alternative? I mean that seriously, not sarcastically or in a defeatist way; try to explore what the alternative might actually be. On the one hand, academia has become rather harsh and intimidating and there is room for all kinds of improvement. On the other hand... there is no world where whoever just wants to study math can just go study whatever they want for as long as they want, regardless of how well they do it. Of course, when I spell it out, that probably seems obvious, but I suspect this may be the unexamined assumption in a lot of people's heads.
- jgamman 10y ago
  "there is no world" - wasn't that what University was like before the 80s and still is in many other countries? minimal fees and some casual work and you can stay for as long as you can stand the conditions of the average student flat ;-) I think you are conflating the reality of your current culture with what was/is in other cultures.
  - jerf 10y ago
    If what you describe was even remotely the case, which I don't know, then there was some other filter in place preventing "everybody" from doing it. I can tell, because not "everybody" did. Plus I suspect you missed my "regardless of how well they do it" clause. I doubt that you can flunk every math class over and over and just keep attending. Loopholes that big get noticed, exploited, and closed very quickly.

Balgair 10y ago

Chiming in from Bio: Yep, this is true here too. I can't find the citations right now, but there was a recent study done through Elsiver's website. The group got a hold of the servers for Elsiver and took a look at page views. They wanted to know what the rates of papers being read was. It was... disheartening. They found that ~46% (again, not sure here as I can't find the source) of papers will never be looked at outside of the authors, reviewers, and the editors. The articles are not only never downloaded, but the pages are never even loaded. The stats were, to me, confusing, but hey that is what peer review is for. Still, if you take this paper (that I can't find now) to be true, ~half of all papers are effectively lecturing into the void. I admit, I drank a bit after reading that one.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y ago
IIRC a lot of that has to do with spammy 'publication mill' journals. If you just look at 'decent' journals, the situation doesn't look nearly as dire.
- FabHK 10y ago
  Elsevier is a despicable firm, but their journals are hardly publication mills, so not sure that response holds water.
  - Balgair 10y ago
    Yes, Elsevier is far from a journal mill designed to H-index hack your way up the credential ladder. They are scum, yes, but they are at least truthful.
    - nocoder 10y ago
      Maybe if Elsevier was open source & easily accessible more people would read it. I have tried reading many journal papers as a layman but in most cases got blocked by a pay wall. I dont like to rely on newspaper headline but like to go the source and because of paywall I get thwarted.

contravariant 10y ago

I don't think pursuing a career in academia was what he had in mind when he said 'do mathematics'. In fact he said specifically: >Teaching mathematics shouldn’t be about sending everybody to a Ph.D. program. That’s a very narrow view of what it means to do mathematics.

maverick_iceman 10y ago
Doing serious research level mathematics (or any other science for that matter) is almost impossible outside academia. Doing serious work is hard and mentally draining. Mere mortals can't motivate themselves to do it unless the incentives align just right (i.e. being in academia). Also it takes all your time so forget about it if you have another job. I know this from personal experience. After I joined industry I thought I'll do physics research in my own time. In fact, I can't even keep myself up to date about current research. Most journal articles require a lot of effort to go through, and I don't have that kind of energy after a work day.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- srssays 10y ago
  That definition is circular. Of course research-level mathematics is done in academia, but there is a much larger field of applied mathematics that is done in industry.
  - xyzzyz 10y ago
    That stuff has very little to do with 90% of academia math. Also, if you specialized and are interested in a certain field of math, the barrier to switch to another field is enormous. On the other hand, 90% of the applied mathematics done in industry is much, much simpler, and very often a trivialized version of what you do in academia, so one could imagine switching to be possible, but what's the joy of doing that? (I have a MS in Math, my field was algebraic geometry. I considered a career in math research, but the industry was paying too well for it to be a reasonable)

cbsmith 10y ago

Yeah, I'd argue a very un-Good Will Hunting thing: if you can be convinced you suck at math, you probably should not pursue a career in academia in math. However... being a math major is really different from a career in academia. People really should be encouraged to major in math.

kzisme 10y ago
I would have to agree with this, but I disagree with out math is taught by most schools. Somewhere in this thread there is a link to Francis's lectures and they are wonderful. The method/enthusiasm be has for teaching is wonderful and makes all the difference to students. Rather than going through online courses and paying for them (many university classes are mostly online math problems, and proctored during a specific time.) EDIT: The way math is currently taught really forces people to dislike math and think they suck at it. (in general)
- hutzlibu 10y ago
  "EDIT: The way math is currently taught really forces people to dislike math and think they suck at it. (in general)" Starting in primary school with basic arithmetik. (I help a young boy with his homework) They don't really teach them Math, how to solve thing, they tech them to memorize different algorithms, which they can handle after a while, but don't know what they are doing at all ... So the best mathematicians there are not the ones who can think best, but who can memorize and follow orders the best.
  - kzisme 10y ago
    I can see how that can work as well, but I would argue having a deeper understanding of the problem (whatever it may be) will benefit any mathematician/student in the long run.
    - hutzlibu 10y ago
      It works, if you don't want to think and just get results. But today there are calculators for that, so I'd like it if they teach them how to think, not to follow.

dalbasal 10y ago

Leaving aside the politics and economics, what do you think a better feedback mechanism might look like?

110011 10y ago
Scientists actually spending more of their time reading others' work, communicating encouragingly and giving constructive criticism (anyone in academia has read more than a few hate filled reviews of their work), better pay (a postdoc at Oxford nets you a monthly salary after taxes of about 2.4k pounds), less focus on numbers and more on quality (a big reason why people don't read papers is because they're missing out on little by not doing so i.e., much of the work is incremental, unsurprising or just badly posed or ill motivated. instead focus must be given to quality and this must come from job hiring decisions which should reflect that science is not a numbers game, but the sad sad truth is it so very is). About the encouragement part, I felt let down many times by senior scientists by their uncaring and viciously competitive nature. All this does not need to be a part of academia. I think greater science can emerge after these structural problems are addressed. But currently the only people who rise to the top are the genuinely good ones and the ones who know how to game the numbers system. Idealists who come for the beauty of math often find themselves woefully unprepared to play all these other games in addition to doing good math.

spynxic 10y ago

> To compensate for this horrible feedback mechanism you need to basically play the popularity game Feedback needn't be a necessity in a work. Assessments and criticism will come if the work is essential, perhaps many years in the future.

110011 10y ago
It sounds like you're not being sarcastic. So let me say that when you're working on something that almost surely has zero practical impact over the course of your lifetime, and the only possible benefit to society is the advancement of the state of our knowledge, a lack of enthusiasm from your peers can be gut wrenching no matter how mentally resilient you think you are. No one does math solely for appreciation from people they admire and respect, but the lack of it, even in the short term, can be very hard on a person.
shoover 10y ago
How many people can live like that in any practical sense? Everything I've ever read about motivation, learning, flow, and mastery holds quick and direct feedback as the most central necessity. Applied to software development, hence we prefer fast compilers over slow, unit tests over integration, working on a desktop over an SSH connection halfway around the world, frequent releases, etc.

vernie 10y ago

[0] baby! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law

clay_to_n 10y ago

We need to do better at cultivating interest in math, as well as other "hard" fields, among people who are normally excluded from the system. Su isn't as concerned with the amount of full-time mathematicians doing research work as he is the people who drop out far before that becomes an option. We should teach it better in high schools, and encourage more math undergraduates. Su isn't saying math is a great field free of problems, but he's arguing we should focus more on getting people further along that path, regardless of the stage where they drop out. I also think the problem you're referring to exists in most academic fields, and that the solution (if there is one) will probably have to be more general than just relate to math.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ZedDogX 10y ago

The academic system is kind of broke; how are we going to fix it?

unixhero 10y ago

Maybe I skimmed the article, but my takeaway from this article was that using our abilities to think and solve mathematical problems helps us to live a life of more intellectual resilience. In my view, this wasn't about doing mathematics as an academic career, climbing up the ivory tower, publish or perish, and all that. Edit: I tend to agree. My intellectual capacity was far improved only after doing first year Engineering Maths & Physics. I did terrible gradewise, but it has helped me visualize, juxtapose mental structures, quickly iterate on different concepts etc. I should go back to doing something again. Had to do some cartesian products in a data migration the other day, in my dayjob, it was refreshing :). And as always, this timeless quote from Einstein motivates "Do not worry too much about your difficulties in mathematics, I can assure you that mine are still greater."

vanderZwan 10y ago
> My intellectual capacity was far improved only after doing first year Engineering Maths & Physics. I did terrible gradewise, but it has helped me visualize, juxtapose mental structures, quickly iterate on different concepts etc. Same here, and thanks to the internet just remembering concepts is usually enough these days. Yesterday I had to quickly guestimate for a project how much space overhead we'd have on the server if we pre-generated an image pyramid of tiles for leaflet.js[0], instead of generating a "PNG" in RAM on the fly each time and serving that. Then I realised the number of pixels shrinks by a quarter every time we zoom out, so the worst case would be the infinite sum of 1/4^n. While I vaguely remember from my first year of physics how to calculate that, it's been over a decade. But we have Wolfram Alpha these days[0], which told me it converges on 4/3. So I knew the upper boundary would be around 4/3 of our original data, plus negligible PNG header overhead, and assuming compression is about the same. [0] http://leafletjs.com/ http://leafletjs.com/ [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+1%2F(4%5Ek) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+1%2F(4%5Ek)
0x445442 10y ago
Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering with minors in Math and Physics here... While I can probably count on one hand the times I've used what I learned in the "real" world, I can say I really value my education. I believe the real value of a math based curriculum or even something like philosophy with an emphasis in logic is that it teaches one how to think in a reasoned, dispassionate and rational way.

cableshaft 10y ago

Wow, I always shied away from academics for similar reasons you mentioned, but I just realized that my main hobby, game development, parallels what you say a lot (and creative hobbies in general, including writing). "You should expect to invest years of your life into making progress on some meaningful game with little encouragement in the meantime...sometimes even after you release a game that took a lot out of you, it may take many years before people appreciate, let alone play, your game, and the vast majority of games aren't going to be played." "To compensate for this you basically play the popularity game and give as many interviews and talk up your game when you meet people, so there's a lot of salesmanship involved there as well." "The career path is so twisted you have to either be insanely good or just hate yourself enough to sacrifice your best years working essentially in the metaphorical darkness well outside the spotlight and most likely alone and poorly paid." <- My experience working in the game industry, except I wasn't completely alone, I did have coworkers. However I did feel like I never had time for a relationship.

dtornabene 10y ago

The article is about math, not necessarily academic math. And it was far from "overly exuberant". Jesus. I have no degree, and do math all the time, precisely for the reasons listed in the article. There endless comments shitting on academic life are obnoxious and tedious, they are also becoming something of a plauge here.

110011 10y ago
Since I made this comment, I also had the chance to listen to his lecture in full. I couldn't agree more with him. What I wrote here was based on my understanding of what he meant by "doing mathematics", which as other commenters also pointed out earlier did not have anything to do with a career in math. I stand corrected.
- dtornabene 10y ago
  Cool! Thanks for taking the time to circle back and add this. I was also responding to the wave of "academia sucks!!!", which, while perhaps true (for some) is getting really old to read in threads here. Appreciate you taking the time to add this comment.