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> In my own field of machine learning, itself an academic descendant of Gauss’s pioneering work, [...]. Yes, and I'm a descendand of Julius Caesar, Confucius a
by mbid 8y ago
> In my own field of machine learning, itself an academic descendant of Gauss’s pioneering work, [...].
Yes, and I'm a descendand of Julius Caesar, Confucius and Charlemagne. I won't
tell you this when introducing myself though, because so is everybody else.
It wouldn't have occured to me that AI researchers have such inferiority complexes that they need to descend to such name-dropping, but I guess I was wrong.
- lccarrasco 8y agoI think he means that the field of ML has been built in part from Gauss's work on algebra and statistics, not that the author is related to Gauss himself.
- Jach 8y agoThe criticism is along the lines of "Yeah basically all fields are academic descendants of Gauss. Euler too." The article's aside is just odd, as is in the first place bringing up Gauss (linking to another Guardian article, maybe the real intent?) and an astronomer both paying another dude (some amount) what sounds like club member fees for letter redistribution.
- lactau 8y agoA small nitpick. Nobody alive is a descendant of Julius Caesar.
- mrybczyn 8y agoNot a "legitimate" descendant, whatever that means after 60 generations. However, he was an aristocrat, and a soldier, in a time when birth control was rarely practiced. I imagine he's got plenty of his DNA in the modern pool.
- gowld 8y agoIt's just a literary segue from their oldest known closed-access publication to the modern day.