26 ms·
Frank Ramsey – The Man Who Thought Too Fast
- brianyu8 6y agoMakes me think of Ramunjan. It's quite tragic to think about how much more knowledge humanity would have if these two lived a little longer.
- markdog12 6y agoOr von Neumann. Of course he was older at 53, but still lots of time left.
- smitty1110 6y agoWe should throw Galois in there as well.
- pixelpoet 6y agoA small and incomplete list of mathematical tragedies (by wiki articles) I keep, to which I'll add Frank Ramsey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Henrik_Abel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Henrik_Abel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
- agumonkey 6y agoWhy is Grothendieck a tragedy ? his departure to reclusion ?
- pixelpoet 6y agoGood question, maybe he shouldn't be on that list. I'd read a long biography about him in German ("Wer ist Alexander Grothendieck?"), and was left with the impression that he was unfulfilled and unhappy at the end of his career; of course he lived to old age and there were certainly worse fates on that list, so perhaps its inclusion is not so appropriate.
- agumonkey 6y agoI'd tend to think that he's not a tragic figure. Maybe dramatic in a way. But since he had a full life and even free choice to do it on its own term.. In any case I hope you didn't feel attacked. It was half curiosity half critic :)
- jnbiche 6y agoIn terms of a metric akin to "mathematical DALYs", Galois was perhaps the most impactful early death of all, followed by Abel. Both Galois and Abel founded entire branches of mathematics before the age of 25.
- renewiltord 6y agoQALYs, surely? :) Dying early would boost DALY count.
- jnbiche 6y agoNo, it wouldn't. They both account for years of early death, just in different ways.
- hetspookjee 6y agoBlaise Pascal should be in the list as well! Death at 39. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal
- pharke 6y agoAdd Turing to the list, having him around during the naissance of molecular genetics and the flowering of computation would have made those fields all the more lively.
- lihaciudaniel 6y agoTuring death made him famous, I wouldn't bet on that
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoCan I assume you know little of Turing's accomplishments? Like von Neumann, he's famous for a reason.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- shkkmo 6y agoI rather think making arguably the biggest individual contribution to winning the biggest war in history is a pretty big contributor to his game. His role in the founding of computer science also doesn't hurt.
- schintan 6y agoCurious if there are any young people with established once in a century kind of talent alive today ?
- jacobedawson 6y agoTerence Tao - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao
- cambalache 6y agoPeter Scholze -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scholze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scholze And doubtless several more. By the way, not only are Scholze and Tao outstanding talents, but very nice and humble, as in ACTUAL nice and humble, and they (especially Tao) write in a crystal clear way so they are wonderful as expositors and academic writers. Makes one chuckle comparing that to so much unrestrained ego online.
- opportune 6y agoYes, my favorite thing about Tao is how well he explains concepts on his blog [0] and on mathoverflow[1]. He does not put on airs of being an unapproachable genius. I guess he knows he has nothing to prove [0] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/ [1] https://mathoverflow.net/users/766/terry-tao https://mathoverflow.net/users/766/terry-tao
- QuesnayJr 6y agoHe thinks in a very expository way, it seems. There's aother guy, Gromov, who is the opposite. He is famously mysterious (people sometimes joke about "speaking Gromovian").
- saeranv 6y agoHis mathoverflow responses are surprisingly intuitive and elegant. Intuition for visualizing/imagining high-dimensional geometry: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/25983/intuitive-crutches-for-higher-dimensional-thinking/26095#26095 https://mathoverflow.net/questions/25983/intuitive-crutches-... Intuition for convolution: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/5892/what-is-convolution-intuitively/5916#5916 https://mathoverflow.net/questions/5892/what-is-convolution-... This is much more satisfying way to think of these concepts. The idea of thinking of convolution as a 'fuzzy' optical phenomena, the idea of thinking of n-dimensional space as a probability distribution. It's interesting the way he grounds his intuition in practical applications. For convolution for example, a common application is to convolve a 2d image with a gaussian kernel to fuzz the image. I know that, but always still had a not-very intuitive, but very dry and technical understanding of convolution as a sort of dot product of two vectors representing the underlying image and the kernel. Terence Tao in contrast exploits the practical intuition of 'fuzziness' in this process to suggest thinking of convolution as a fuzzy (probablistic) addition of functions. It's a subtle step, but giving some sort of physical, or visual intuition for mathethematics like this is so helpful.
- frankbreetz 6y ago>>Discounting the interests of future people, Ramsey wrote, is “ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination. Climate change, the federal debt, increasing shareholder value over anything else, I wonder what Ramsey would have to say about the current state of the world.
- slivanes 6y agoWould he be working at a FAANG trying to get more clicks for advertiser dollars?
- snehalsam 6y agoOr building a algo to price futures and options
- masklinn 6y agoThat seems very unlike the political and ethical philosophy he espoused in life. And he was an academic and teacher throughout, graduating in 1923 and becoming a fellow of King’s in 1924, then lecturer, then Director of Studies.
- ppod 6y agoIncreasing economic growth is the most reliable method we know of to help future generations.
- gumby 6y agoEuler is really the master in terms of sheer volume and mathematical scope. You supposedly could get a theorem named after you if you discovered it in Euler’s notebooks (though probably well picked over by now).
- hetspookjee 6y agoI believe Carl Friedrich Gauss is a close second to Euler.
- Someone 6y agoFor those who want to compare them: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leo... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Carl_Friedrich_Gauss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Car... Judged by the number of multiple-surname ‘things’ on both pages, Gauss seems to have been more of a collaborator, or more of his discoveries were also made by others at about the same time.
- dan-robertson 6y agoNot that well picked over. After about 100 years of work and several volumes being published, the work on producing the complete collected works of Euler is not done.
- gumby 6y agoWow!
- mordymoop 6y ago> (As an Oxford mathematician, Martin Gould, has explained, Ramsey theory tells us, for instance, that among any six users of Facebook there will always be either a trio of mutual friends or a trio in which none are friends.) What is the sensible/true version of this? Clearly it’s not correct as stated. You could have three pairs of two mutuals. You could have five mutuals and a singlet. Or six mutuals. Is it more a statement about probabilities?
- MaysonL 6y agoThree pairs of two mutuals: take one from each pair, that's a trio with no friendships. Five mutuals: take any three and there's a trio of mutuals.
- mordymoop 6y agoThanks. I still think the wording of the original description isn’t great. If I point at a group of six people sitting at a table and say “three of them are friends”, the natural assumption is that three and only three of them are friends, not that all of them are friends and therefor three of them are friends. But I suppose I will choose not to die on the hill of slightly misleading language and admit I was just wrong.
- renewiltord 6y agoThis is a classical joke among new students to Mathematics to break the habit of the English language description being translated to the Mathematical problem statement. It goes in a question and answer format something like: "You knew a girl in high-school. In situation A, you find out years later that she is a stage actor and a dancer. In situation B, you find out years later that she is a stage actor. Compare how likely the second one is to the first one" In plain English there's an implied meaning of "she is a stage actor and not a dancer" in situation B. But that is not the statement. Situation B is as likely or more than Situation A but not if you use the English language description which suddenly is under-specified without real-world information. Obviously you pick the things to play to the priors of the person you're asking so that if they think actors frequently dance you put that in there. That leads them down the false rabbit hole of whether it's "stage actor and dancer" vs. "stage actor and not dancer" that you're comparing.
- sn41 6y agoThe Ramsey number R(m,n) is the minimum size of a fully connected graph with edges colored red or blue such that there is either an m-sized blue clique or an n-sized red clique. R(3,3) is 6, which is stated as every group of 6 having 3 mutual friends or 3 mutual strangers. Ramsey showed that these exist for every m and n, I think. But they grow very rapidly. Ramsey theory has usually the biggest constants found in mathematical papers.[1] There is a famous quote by Erdos: "Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year's time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue five. We could marshal the world's best minds and fastest computers, and within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice but to launch a preemptive attack." [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number
- zimpenfish 6y agoWhat always gets me about Graham's Number is that you can't even write down how many digits it has using the entire observable universe ... but "the last 12 digits are ...262464195387". I swear mathematicians are witches.
- signa11 6y agoif you have not seen this before: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html and it's companion https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/from-1-to-1000000.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/from-1-to-1000000.html are pretty cool.
- bonoboTP 6y agoIt's so big that going from the number itself to the number of digits (i.e. taking its logarithm) is not even something worth talking about. It's like blowing a kiss to an exploding nuclear bomb. You just get dizzy even thinking about it. The observable universe is just not really that big when talking about this stuff, there are not even 100 orders of magnitude in the universe from smallest to biggest. Anything that you can have a conception of (even stuff like the number of possible lottery tickets or possible books that could ever be written etc) is just indistinguishable from mundane everyday sizes when dealing with googology. You're trying to roar but it comes out as a whisper. You have to explicitly design these. Most of the time if you think "but wouldn't it be comparable if we counted the XYZ) the answer is no. It's like an adult equivalent of a kid saying "I get that galaxies are big, but are they also bigger than really big houses? How about a house with its own swimming pool? Really really big mansion of a big movie star?" Edit: Tone is difficult in writing, I don't mean to be condescending, I'm getting dizzy myself when thinking of this and remember my frustration and amazement when first hearing about these.
- ur-whale 6y agohttp://archive.is/zLLj5 http://archive.is/zLLj5
- rv-de 6y ago> “There was something of Newton about him,” Strachey continued. “The ease and majesty of the thought—the gentleness of the temperament.” Wasn't he a pretty ruthless and competitive guy?
- pgt 6y agoIf anyone from the New Yorker sees this, here is what your user interface looks like to the average reader of your online newspaper: https://imgur.com/a/kCoxLHR https://imgur.com/a/kCoxLHR Notice the % that is content.
- jahn716 6y agoGiven the media industry's history, I'm sure if anyone relevant does see your post, that white space is simply going to be used as display ad real estate.
- dan-robertson 6y agoThere’s lots of great stuff in Ramsey theory. In some sense it feels quite different to a lot of other mathematics. It also has the great property that it is typically very hard to look at a statement in Ramsey theory and know if it is likely true or not, or even if it will likely be easy to prove or not. For example consider a recently disproven long-standing problem of Ramsey theory: Is it possible to colour the natural numbers with two colours such that no Pythagorean triple is all one colour? This question was asked by Ron Graham many years ago with a $100 prize for the answer, assuming it would be reasonably easy to prove. It was recently solved with an absolutely enormous multi-terabyte computer proof. It turns out you can colour everything up to 7824 fine but no choice for 7825 is sufficient.
- papeda 6y agoNot the point, but I love this bit: > Lydia made the mistake of remarking, “What a beautiful tree,” presumably too casually, whereupon Wittgenstein glared and demanded, “What do you mean?” and she burst into tears.