7 ms·
Makes 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.
by brianyu8 6y ago
Makes 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.