12 ms·

Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf]

226 points by srimukh 6y ago

fouc 6y ago
This seems to be related to doing well in Academia
- Forge36 6y ago
  It is, but the advice isn't strictly academic. How to give good lectures -> how to present well in a meeting. How to acknowledge mistakes, and differentiate between fatal mistakes ones of lesser detail
lorey 6y ago
Damn, I really like the design/layout. Anyone know where to find it by any chance?
- jamessb 6y ago
  The AMS uses LaTeX for typesetting. They release packages for their other journals [1], but not Notices, which apparently [2] uses Lucia Bright, a font that is not free. [1]: https://www.ams.org/arc/journals/journal-produce.html https://www.ams.org/arc/journals/journal-produce.html [2]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/76053/which-font-is-used-in-notices-of-the-ams https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/76053/which-font-is-...
  - pflanze 6y ago
    The PDF file contains the string "/Creator (QuarkXPress\252: LaserWriter 8 8.3.3)", so it doesn't appear to be made with LaTeX. I'm not a designer but I know designer friends using QuarkXPress around that time, and it is my understanding that you'd create the layout largely via the QuarkXPress GUI and also much manual tweaking, so the layout was probably confined to the company producing this document.
  - jimhefferon 6y ago
    They are for sale from the TeX Users Group, https://tug.org/store/lucida/index.html https://tug.org/store/lucida/index.html, which helps out the group and gives you nice fonts also.
Forge36 6y ago
(I really enjoyed this article) It does take some effort to translate from academia to a corporate environment I'll try do so in a reply. High level points: Lecturing Blackboard Technique Publish the Same Result Several Times You Are More Likely to Be Remembered by Your Expository Work Every Mathematician Has Only a Few Tricks Do Not Worry about Your Mistakes Use the Feynman Method Give Lavish Acknowledgments Write Informative Introductions Be Prepared for Old Age
- Forge36 6y ago
  >After writing a rather long paper, I began to draft a thorough bibliography. On the spur of the moment I decided to cite a few pa- pers which had nothing whatsoever to do with the content of my paper to see what might hap- pen. >Somewhat to my surprise, I received letters from two of the authors whose papers I believed were irrelevant to my article. Both letters were written in an emotionally charged tone. Each of the authors warmly congratulated me for being the first to acknowledge their contribution to the field. That's a very interesting approach.
- Forge36 6y ago
  Present Directly Present Clearly Iterate On Your Work Specialize: Add as much new detail to a single piece of work. Everyone has specialized skills, there's fame in using them to their fullest potential to explore many areas. >There are two kinds of mistakes. There are fatal mistakes that destroy a theory, but there are also contingent ones, which are useful in testing the stability of a theory. Use the Feynman Method >keep a dozen of your favorite problems con- stantly present in your mind, [...] Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Give Credit To Others no matter how small Summarize Everything Clearly and as long as is necessary: show your work second. Your position as an authority will change abruptly. (I'm have a harder time rephrasing this. Your work will go from "meh he's washed out" to "he's perfected his craft" for identical reasons depending on how well it's received)
mxschumacher 6y ago
I wonder how the "Publish the Same Result Several Times" recommendation ties into the "publish or perish"-mantra. I suspect that 1997 was a different time. Many academics have a super-human publication cadence, not so much because of all the new knowledge they've extracted from the universe but because they aggressively re-publish their existing results. Very low read- and citation counts are common implications. From the outside, it seems hard to sift through all the redundancy. At the edge of knowledge it gets harder to verify what is genuinely new and what is a rehash. It feels like the infrastructure and format around scientific publishing could benefit from compression, consistency and version control.
- Forge36 6y ago
  I think this was the version control when paper was big :) Over of the other points on the article was "lengthen your summary" which was to address that very low read count! I wonder if it's possible to make a "github of research" where articles are more publicly revised only showing the most recent (celebrating Theory 2.0! And 2.0.1 -fixed typos) I took the publish process to be: iterate on your thesis. I saw the pattern as: Ask for feedback from a small group. Improve ask a larger, more reputable group. Repeat. I'm not current on what constitutes a prestigious Journal today (is Nature still a top Journal?).
  - ctchocula 6y ago
    arxiv.org lets you submit revisions to a paper you have previously submitted and putd the label v2, v3, etc. A lot of preprints will go up for physics and computer science papers, while medrxiv.org fills the same role for health sciences.
- czep 6y ago
  > what is genuinely new and what is a rehash. I struggled with this in grad school, as it often felt I was rereading the same material in multiple journals, and the examples of my successful peers appeared to me to be the same paper with 8 different introductions! But the example Rota gives of Riesz is illuminating: by refining an idea over time, not simply rehashing, the product improves and eventually becomes "perfect". I think this is the original and benign intent of what has often devolved into the appearance of "publish or perish".
durnygbur 6y ago
These hints reminded me that we don't have "great scientists" anymore. Can you list recent Nobel Prize laureates? Great scientists were basically people-institutions and all the mundane and scrupulous work was done by assistants, doctoral candidates, technicians, as we have an example of Hilbert and some much less known mathematician. There still exist relicts of this system in the academia. With increasing emancipation and alternative opportunities this extend of exploitation of the nameless is not possible anymore, and this is good.
- 535188B17C93743 6y ago
  We do have "pop scientists". While they're not all necessarily "groundbreaking" or "leading researchers", I wouldn't discount the impact of folks like Neil Degrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, and Brian Greene.
  - toyg 6y ago
    In the UK, Brian Cox for physics/astronomy and David Attenborough in the natural sciences are likely responsible for enough recruitment that will probably lead to significant knowledge gains.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Carl Sagan, to a previous generation. Arguably one might make the same case for Michael Faraday or Humphry Davy, who's fame in large part devolves from excellent and hugely popular public demonstrations of their work. It's not that they didn't (necessarily) also do groundbreaking work. But they were phenomenally effective communicators. Extended to writing, Darwin, Einstein, and Feynman could be similarly considered.
- dghughes 6y ago
  > Can you list recent Nobel Prize laureates? For me the Nobel Prize was greatly diminished in 2014 when the Nobel committee lost all credibility. The inventor of the LED Nick Holonyak, Jr. didn't win a Nobel Prize but in 2014 the inventors of the blue LED did; Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura.
- 6y ago
alderz 6y ago
Related to the "Every Mathematician Has Only a Few Tricks" point, there is a Mathoverflow question https://mathoverflow.net/questions/363119/every-mathematician-has-only-a-few-tricks https://mathoverflow.net/questions/363119/every-mathematicia... that tries to list all of those tricks, which is pretty interesting.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  That quote about hating Erdos is interesting. I think my professor for UCLA undergraduate honors seminar from years ago, hated Erdos (he at least express dislike for a colleague of Erdos who operated similar). My impression is Erdos appeared to operated as something like a whirlwind of chaotic fact and theory finding whereas at least some other mathematicians aim to build larger unifying structures. It's a sort of Erdos versus Bourbaki divide (not to say who's right).
scottlocklin 6y ago
Rota is sort of the RP Feynman of mathematics; his "Indiscrete Thoughts" was probably the best thing I read in 2019; I recommend it to anyone who enjoys two fisted tales of applied math.
cableshaft 6y ago
"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.” Basically just did this again this week. I was re-reading a three year old board game design diary I had written, and came upon an old idea that I had put on the backburner after the prototype played just "ok". I tried to come up with ways to fix it for awhile, and the ideas I had then were so different they morphed into completely different designs (more specifically, it morphed into 1 different design, which bombed in playtesting, and then that morphed into a totally different design, which did really well in playtesting and I showed to publishers, and then reflecting on their feedback resulted in a completely new design sparking in my head). I thought about the problem for a few more seconds, and one new thing to try popped into my head, not a totally different game this time still keeping with the core mechanism, but a different method how players were given and used the cards, and I dug into it a bit more, and I decided on a different method of point distribution for the cards, and then thought a bit more, and the thought of adding abilities that encourage comboing based one previous or next cards played popped into my head, and then I decided to run with it, came up with a new prototype, tried it out, and it felt at least three times better, and felt more like a game that could be published. I have a game that is currently a finalist in a game design contest whose design had remained dormant for over a year because I was unsatisfied with it, but something made me think about it again and a new mechanism popped in my head and I tried that and felt a lot better about it. The Feynman method works for me, at least when it comes to designing board games. I don't mind shelving game designs for a long period of time anymore, since I have had so much luck with just thinking about them again every once in awhile and fresh new ideas popping into my head to improve the game, that likely wouldn't have happened if I kept forcing myself to think about that game.
- kleer001 6y ago
  RUMINATING! I just watched a bunch of Marvin Minsky lectures about his theory of the Society of Mind. One of his early questions was (paraphrased) "With all these words for emotions where are the words for thinking?" He eventually popped the ones he'd found up on the board. And, of course, I sketched up some of my own. But nowhere in either of those lists was the quite apropos reference to how a whole swath of unrelated mammals have come to solve the process of digestion of rough food material. And, if we consider thoughts, ideas, and problems to be rough material then I think the word works perfectly. I'd heard of Feynman's process, but for some reason never thought to assign it this very appropriate word. Thanks for the inspiration and reminder. Best of luck on the game! Please Show HN when you can share it. :)
JadeNB 6y ago
Could we put "Rota" in the title? It's currently not even clear from the title that this is about mathematics, let alone that it's written by an expert and highly opinionated mathematician.
xenonite 6y ago
The author writes that a scientist is probably best remembered by his or her expository work. How ironic that I have never heard of this author before, and this paper is probably the only one I will ever read of him. So his statement rings true. His name is Gian-Carlo Rota.
dang 6y ago
Rota had at least three different ten-lesson sets: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E0%20rota%20lessons&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Looks like the previous discussions of this set are: 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989599 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747598 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220746 2007 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85611
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Wait, we can limit Algolia results by comment counts? Oh, also author, points, and timestamps: https://hn.algolia.com/help https://hn.algolia.com/help
jhallenworld 6y ago
"My late friend Stan Ulam used to remark that his life was sharply divided into two halves. In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group; in the second half, he was always the oldest." Can confirm that this happens to software engineers.

226 points by srimukh 6y ago

fouc 6y ago

This seems to be related to doing well in Academia

Forge36 6y ago
It is, but the advice isn't strictly academic. How to give good lectures -> how to present well in a meeting. How to acknowledge mistakes, and differentiate between fatal mistakes ones of lesser detail

lorey 6y ago

Damn, I really like the design/layout. Anyone know where to find it by any chance?

jamessb 6y ago
The AMS uses LaTeX for typesetting. They release packages for their other journals [1], but not Notices, which apparently [2] uses Lucia Bright, a font that is not free. [1]: https://www.ams.org/arc/journals/journal-produce.html https://www.ams.org/arc/journals/journal-produce.html [2]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/76053/which-font-is-used-in-notices-of-the-ams https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/76053/which-font-is-...
- pflanze 6y ago
  The PDF file contains the string "/Creator (QuarkXPress\252: LaserWriter 8 8.3.3)", so it doesn't appear to be made with LaTeX. I'm not a designer but I know designer friends using QuarkXPress around that time, and it is my understanding that you'd create the layout largely via the QuarkXPress GUI and also much manual tweaking, so the layout was probably confined to the company producing this document.
- jimhefferon 6y ago
  They are for sale from the TeX Users Group, https://tug.org/store/lucida/index.html https://tug.org/store/lucida/index.html, which helps out the group and gives you nice fonts also.

Forge36 6y ago

(I really enjoyed this article) It does take some effort to translate from academia to a corporate environment I'll try do so in a reply. High level points: Lecturing Blackboard Technique Publish the Same Result Several Times You Are More Likely to Be Remembered by Your Expository Work Every Mathematician Has Only a Few Tricks Do Not Worry about Your Mistakes Use the Feynman Method Give Lavish Acknowledgments Write Informative Introductions Be Prepared for Old Age

Forge36 6y ago
>After writing a rather long paper, I began to draft a thorough bibliography. On the spur of the moment I decided to cite a few pa- pers which had nothing whatsoever to do with the content of my paper to see what might hap- pen. >Somewhat to my surprise, I received letters from two of the authors whose papers I believed were irrelevant to my article. Both letters were written in an emotionally charged tone. Each of the authors warmly congratulated me for being the first to acknowledge their contribution to the field. That's a very interesting approach.
Forge36 6y ago
Present Directly Present Clearly Iterate On Your Work Specialize: Add as much new detail to a single piece of work. Everyone has specialized skills, there's fame in using them to their fullest potential to explore many areas. >There are two kinds of mistakes. There are fatal mistakes that destroy a theory, but there are also contingent ones, which are useful in testing the stability of a theory. Use the Feynman Method >keep a dozen of your favorite problems con- stantly present in your mind, [...] Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Give Credit To Others no matter how small Summarize Everything Clearly and as long as is necessary: show your work second. Your position as an authority will change abruptly. (I'm have a harder time rephrasing this. Your work will go from "meh he's washed out" to "he's perfected his craft" for identical reasons depending on how well it's received)

mxschumacher 6y ago

I wonder how the "Publish the Same Result Several Times" recommendation ties into the "publish or perish"-mantra. I suspect that 1997 was a different time. Many academics have a super-human publication cadence, not so much because of all the new knowledge they've extracted from the universe but because they aggressively re-publish their existing results. Very low read- and citation counts are common implications. From the outside, it seems hard to sift through all the redundancy. At the edge of knowledge it gets harder to verify what is genuinely new and what is a rehash. It feels like the infrastructure and format around scientific publishing could benefit from compression, consistency and version control.

Forge36 6y ago
I think this was the version control when paper was big :) Over of the other points on the article was "lengthen your summary" which was to address that very low read count! I wonder if it's possible to make a "github of research" where articles are more publicly revised only showing the most recent (celebrating Theory 2.0! And 2.0.1 -fixed typos) I took the publish process to be: iterate on your thesis. I saw the pattern as: Ask for feedback from a small group. Improve ask a larger, more reputable group. Repeat. I'm not current on what constitutes a prestigious Journal today (is Nature still a top Journal?).
- ctchocula 6y ago
  arxiv.org lets you submit revisions to a paper you have previously submitted and putd the label v2, v3, etc. A lot of preprints will go up for physics and computer science papers, while medrxiv.org fills the same role for health sciences.
czep 6y ago
> what is genuinely new and what is a rehash. I struggled with this in grad school, as it often felt I was rereading the same material in multiple journals, and the examples of my successful peers appeared to me to be the same paper with 8 different introductions! But the example Rota gives of Riesz is illuminating: by refining an idea over time, not simply rehashing, the product improves and eventually becomes "perfect". I think this is the original and benign intent of what has often devolved into the appearance of "publish or perish".

durnygbur 6y ago

These hints reminded me that we don't have "great scientists" anymore. Can you list recent Nobel Prize laureates? Great scientists were basically people-institutions and all the mundane and scrupulous work was done by assistants, doctoral candidates, technicians, as we have an example of Hilbert and some much less known mathematician. There still exist relicts of this system in the academia. With increasing emancipation and alternative opportunities this extend of exploitation of the nameless is not possible anymore, and this is good.

535188B17C93743 6y ago
We do have "pop scientists". While they're not all necessarily "groundbreaking" or "leading researchers", I wouldn't discount the impact of folks like Neil Degrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, and Brian Greene.
- toyg 6y ago
  In the UK, Brian Cox for physics/astronomy and David Attenborough in the natural sciences are likely responsible for enough recruitment that will probably lead to significant knowledge gains.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Carl Sagan, to a previous generation. Arguably one might make the same case for Michael Faraday or Humphry Davy, who's fame in large part devolves from excellent and hugely popular public demonstrations of their work. It's not that they didn't (necessarily) also do groundbreaking work. But they were phenomenally effective communicators. Extended to writing, Darwin, Einstein, and Feynman could be similarly considered.
dghughes 6y ago
> Can you list recent Nobel Prize laureates? For me the Nobel Prize was greatly diminished in 2014 when the Nobel committee lost all credibility. The inventor of the LED Nick Holonyak, Jr. didn't win a Nobel Prize but in 2014 the inventors of the blue LED did; Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura.
6y ago

alderz 6y ago

Related to the "Every Mathematician Has Only a Few Tricks" point, there is a Mathoverflow question https://mathoverflow.net/questions/363119/every-mathematician-has-only-a-few-tricks https://mathoverflow.net/questions/363119/every-mathematicia... that tries to list all of those tricks, which is pretty interesting.

joe_the_user 6y ago
That quote about hating Erdos is interesting. I think my professor for UCLA undergraduate honors seminar from years ago, hated Erdos (he at least express dislike for a colleague of Erdos who operated similar). My impression is Erdos appeared to operated as something like a whirlwind of chaotic fact and theory finding whereas at least some other mathematicians aim to build larger unifying structures. It's a sort of Erdos versus Bourbaki divide (not to say who's right).

scottlocklin 6y ago

Rota is sort of the RP Feynman of mathematics; his "Indiscrete Thoughts" was probably the best thing I read in 2019; I recommend it to anyone who enjoys two fisted tales of applied math.

cableshaft 6y ago

"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.” Basically just did this again this week. I was re-reading a three year old board game design diary I had written, and came upon an old idea that I had put on the backburner after the prototype played just "ok". I tried to come up with ways to fix it for awhile, and the ideas I had then were so different they morphed into completely different designs (more specifically, it morphed into 1 different design, which bombed in playtesting, and then that morphed into a totally different design, which did really well in playtesting and I showed to publishers, and then reflecting on their feedback resulted in a completely new design sparking in my head). I thought about the problem for a few more seconds, and one new thing to try popped into my head, not a totally different game this time still keeping with the core mechanism, but a different method how players were given and used the cards, and I dug into it a bit more, and I decided on a different method of point distribution for the cards, and then thought a bit more, and the thought of adding abilities that encourage comboing based one previous or next cards played popped into my head, and then I decided to run with it, came up with a new prototype, tried it out, and it felt at least three times better, and felt more like a game that could be published. I have a game that is currently a finalist in a game design contest whose design had remained dormant for over a year because I was unsatisfied with it, but something made me think about it again and a new mechanism popped in my head and I tried that and felt a lot better about it. The Feynman method works for me, at least when it comes to designing board games. I don't mind shelving game designs for a long period of time anymore, since I have had so much luck with just thinking about them again every once in awhile and fresh new ideas popping into my head to improve the game, that likely wouldn't have happened if I kept forcing myself to think about that game.

kleer001 6y ago
RUMINATING! I just watched a bunch of Marvin Minsky lectures about his theory of the Society of Mind. One of his early questions was (paraphrased) "With all these words for emotions where are the words for thinking?" He eventually popped the ones he'd found up on the board. And, of course, I sketched up some of my own. But nowhere in either of those lists was the quite apropos reference to how a whole swath of unrelated mammals have come to solve the process of digestion of rough food material. And, if we consider thoughts, ideas, and problems to be rough material then I think the word works perfectly. I'd heard of Feynman's process, but for some reason never thought to assign it this very appropriate word. Thanks for the inspiration and reminder. Best of luck on the game! Please Show HN when you can share it. :)

JadeNB 6y ago

Could we put "Rota" in the title? It's currently not even clear from the title that this is about mathematics, let alone that it's written by an expert and highly opinionated mathematician.

xenonite 6y ago

The author writes that a scientist is probably best remembered by his or her expository work. How ironic that I have never heard of this author before, and this paper is probably the only one I will ever read of him. So his statement rings true. His name is Gian-Carlo Rota.

dang 6y ago

Rota had at least three different ten-lesson sets: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E0%20rota%20lessons&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Looks like the previous discussions of this set are: 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989599 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747598 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220746 2007 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85611

dredmorbius 6y ago
Wait, we can limit Algolia results by comment counts? Oh, also author, points, and timestamps: https://hn.algolia.com/help https://hn.algolia.com/help

jhallenworld 6y ago

"My late friend Stan Ulam used to remark that his life was sharply divided into two halves. In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group; in the second half, he was always the oldest." Can confirm that this happens to software engineers.