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UC Berkeley research fellow Michael Cohen dies at 25
- santaclaus 9y agoHow does one publish 30 papers in 3 years? That is an insane rate! Just navigating the political ramifications, dealing with revisions, etc, on three or four a year is a serious pain in the ass, let alone ten.
- jpeterman 9y agoWell co-author. First author is one thing, co-author is another. And I no way mean any disrespect to someone who obviously has contributed a great deal to his field.
- rifung 9y agoI don't think there's the concept of first author in theoretical CS? All the papers I've seen there follow the same practice as in Math, where authors are just alphabetical.
- dragonwriter 9y agoNo matter how they are listed, someone is probably doing a disprortionate share of the team wrangling and managing the process to publication.
- relyio 9y agoThat's another matter entirely. Yes, authors don't always bring equal contribution and effort into an academic work. But, here it's someone claiming that not being first author is a major deal, or bears any significance at all, when in fact it doesn't.
- dragonwriter 9y agoI read the claim that not being first author (who in may, but not all—IIRC, e.g., biosciences are different—other fields is normally the person who is the administrative point) means less irreducible management overhead limiting total throughput, in response to a comment indication that the shear administrative overhead of the number of publications seemed prohibitive.
- rifung 9y agoMy concern was not about the administrative burden of publishing but of the difficulty of actually finding results which are publishable. I'm not sure which the original comment though.
- relyio 9y agoThat's not always true at all and varies greatly from one sub-field to another. I have read countless top-conference papers where the authorship are obviously attributed in alphabetical order.
- rokob 9y agoWhat is considered a paper in CS is different than in many other fields. That is not to say the content is not worthy of publication, just that they tend to be shorter and often are more focused on a single issue. There are also publications in conference proceedings that are usually an easier review process. Looking at his top 10 by citation count on google scholar shows most in proceedings and under 10 pages. Arguably it is more intellectual work, but the process is less arduous so the rate isn't that insane.
- santaclaus 9y ago> There are also publications in conference proceedings that are usually an easier review process. The big CS conferences are around 20% acceptance rate, Science and Nature are around 7%. So while easier than Science, that is still quite an accomplishment!
- fatjokes 9y agoGetting a paper into high-impact conferences are definitely still an incredible accomplishment, but comparing these acceptance rates is a bit misleading. Those CS conferences have a very narrow scope, while Science and Nature literally cover any topic pertaining to science and nature... including CS :).
- Upvoter33 9y ago"There are also publications in conference proceedings that are usually an easier review process." this is not really true; in systems conferences, for example, you might get 7 or even 10 long, detailed reviews about your work; most papers are rejected (say 80-90% out of 300); a shepherd ensures that if accepted, the paper is appropriately revised. And, it's different in most every subfield of CS. So why make the overly broad (and wrong) generalization?
- mathperson 9y agoless arduous is a bit subjective no? different types of intellectual labor different types of standards etc including length.
- ssalazars 9y agoHow does someone dies of "natural causes" at 25? This sounds more like an unknown health condition.
- mxschumacher 9y agodying from a disease is still a natural cause. Unnatural would be getting killed, suicide, accidents etc.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- goialoq 9y agoThe term "natural causes" is a misnomer for "non-human-agent causes".
- microcolonel 9y agoIt fits the "natural versus artificial" dichotomy. i.e. anything is natural if it comes about without human agency.
- lutorm 9y agoIf I die from a lightning strike while hiking, I'm pretty sure that's not counting as "natural causes" either.
- Retric 9y agoNot quite, 'Eaten by shark' for example is not usually lumped under natural causes. Even if that's a natural event.
- revelation 9y agoPreexisting congenital conditions. There is always one or two young people in any given year that decide to do some endurance event and simply drop dead from what looks like a heart attack.
- tabeth 9y agoLife is so precious. To think any one of us reading this could be gone tomorrow.
- kylec 9y agoI'm morbidly curious what the odds are that someone reading this will be gone tomorrow. I'll bet it's non-trivial.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- danso 9y agoGiven that HN's demographic skews heavily towards young males with high-income jobs, the chances of death tomorrow are probably more slight than for most general audiences.
- nkurz 9y agoI think you are right: the chances aren't extreme, but are non-trivial. This looks to be a chart that has the mortality data necessary to answer your question (although presumably it also includes "non-natural" causes like suicide and homicide): https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html. The first two columns show age, and the probability that a holder of an American Social Security card who is of that age will die within the next year. For all but the oldest ages, I think it should be accurate to simply divide this by 365 to calculate the chance that an individual of that age will die within 24 hours. From the chart --- and oversimplifying HN demographics by assuming they match those of chart and consist only of 30-year-old American males --- the probability of death within the year is 0.0015; making each individual's daily chance of death 0.000004, which is about 1 out 250,000. Unless I'm misremembering, to calculate the chance that at least one person out of a group of size N dies, it's easiest to exponentiate the probability of survival (1 - .000004 == 0.999996) ^ N, and then subtract this from 1 to find the chance of at least one death. If we guess that we readers are one-thousand 30-year-old males, I think that means there is about a half a percent chance that one of us will die before tomorrow ((1 - (0.999996 ^ 1000)) == 0.004). If we instead assume ten-thousand 30-year-old males, then we get about a 4% chance that someone won't be around after tomorrow. If we generously assume a hundred-thousand such readers, then there is about a 30% chance that one of us won't make it another full day. I don't know what the actual readership numbers are for this post (or maybe the grandparent was self-referencing their own comment rather than the main post?) but it seems likely that it's somewhere within that range. If we use a more realistic age distribution for HN, the probability would go up (older readers increase the probability more than younger readers decrease it). On the other hand, if we assume that HN readers on average have better health care and less risk of violence than randomly chosen Social Security card holders, then the probability would go down. But suicide risk would probably go the other way, so I don't know what the total correction factor would be. Still, I'd guess this estimate would remain in the ballpark. Corrections to my methodology or calculations appreciated.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- anjellow 9y agoIf anyone's interested, I found video of Michael Cohen as a guest lecturer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3umLs_SnhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3umLs_SnhQ
- nschiefer 9y agoI'm a friend and colleague of Michael's at MIT. This article is very nice and gives a good summary of what made Michael so special. In a lot of ways, Michael was the animating "spirit" of the MIT theory group. He had an encyclopedic knowledge and incredibly deep understanding of basically every area of computer science, and many areas beyond; in the short year that I knew him, we had conversations about everything from convex optimization to computer architecture to rent control laws to Medieval philosophy. Michael was a truly remarkable researcher. Ludwig's comments about him being the type that you "only see a couple of times in a generation" are accurate. I also recommend watching the start of Yin-Tat Lee's recent talk [1] at the Simons Institute. Yin-Tat is a prolific researcher himself, so his comments carry a lot of weight. For those wondering about Michael's publication count: computer science (and especially theoretical computer science) is a "high publication" field, in part because of the nature of publishing in conferences and in part because the field is young and there are many good open problems. Still, Michael's publication record is abnormally strong and reflects his collaborative nature. Regarding the comments about co-authorship, Michael could easily have been a co-author on a dozen more papers if he had cared, since he often contributed the main ideas to projects that he never formally joined. This was definitely my experience collaborating with him. I expect that Michael will be more prolific in the next year than many living researchers, from the point of view of publishing. His papers (incomplete list here [2]) are very well written, by the way. I recommend checking them out. The most incredible thing about Michael was the way he learned. If you talked about something that he didn't understand, he'd quiz you about it until he did. And he did this with everyone, from brand new grad students like me to famous professors. At the same time, Michael was incredibly generous. He liked to talk, and you could interrupt him at any time and he'd explain everything to you with astounding patience. Michael wasn't in science for glory; he just really loved learning and teaching. He's already profoundly missed and our entire community is shocked by his untimely passing. My deepest condolences go to Michael's family. We hope to have a memorial website up soon, especially since Michael was too humble to have much of an online presence. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pIheZseT1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pIheZseT1U [2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=t3kDJHQAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=t3kDJHQAAAAJ...
- imranq 9y agoLive as if you were going to die tomorrow, learn as if you were going to live forever – Gandhi
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mfukar 9y agoI'd only made the acquaintance of Michael through a mutual friend. In but a few hours, I became convinced this person is one in a billion. What a pity.
- notfromhere 9y agoHow does one die of natural causes at 25?
- Madmallard 9y agoNatural causes just means ruling out of external causes and accidental death.