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I think you may be misunderstanding the implication. It's not that he's a postdoc that's surprising, but that he's a statistician who happens to have solved a m

I think you may be misunderstanding the implication. It's not that he's a postdoc that's surprising, but that he's a statistician who happens to have solved a major problem in convex geometry. The following quote sums it up: "Chen is not a convex geometer by training — instead, he is a statistician who became interested in the KLS conjecture because he wanted to get a handle on random sampling. “No one knows Yuansi Chen in our community,” Eldan said. “It’s pretty cool that you have this guy coming out of nowhere, solving one of [our] most important problems.”" The great thing is, the reaction of the community working on these type of problems was to understand and verify the result. And once it was, all credit to him.

tpoacher 6y ago
Thanks for this explanation. That makes it slightly better I guess. It still sounds subtly presumptive though, when placed as the subheading. It feels a bit like when journalists report female scientists and feel the need to report their marital status in the first paragraph.
- bopbeepboop 6y ago
  It’s not like that at all. It’s like reporting “chemist solves problem in particle physics” — which is interesting and a bit unexpected, but not at all an unrelated factoid about the person in the way marital status would be.
  - tpoacher 6y ago
    Like I said, it's not the news itself, it's the phrasing of the subheading that bothers me. To use your example, it's more like saying "experts surprised female chemist solves problem in particle physics", when "chemist solves problem in particle physics" would have been so much better. But I take your point.
    - bopbeepboop 6y ago
      What word in the subheading do you believe is like “female” in your example? “Postdoctoral”? I’m genuinely confused here. It sounds like “experts surprised professional chemist solves problem in particle physics”. “Professional chemist” is a meaningful title, unlike “female chemist”. The problem with naked “chemist” is that there’s a lot of grades — from student to hobbyist to YouTuber to postdoc to PI for industry lab. How are you interpreting “postdoc” the same way as “female”? One if those is a job; one of those is a biological fact.
- gnulinux 6y ago
  Absolutely not at all. Statistics and geometry are very different fields. Sure they both use some part of mathematics and an undergrad level statistics and geometry curriculum will have many common classes, but at post-doc level it is definitely surprising. I'm not saying a statistician is not qualified to do research in geometry -- they might be competent enough to do so -- it's just surprising because statistics and geometry work on different problems.

tpoacher 6y ago

Thanks for this explanation. That makes it slightly better I guess. It still sounds subtly presumptive though, when placed as the subheading. It feels a bit like when journalists report female scientists and feel the need to report their marital status in the first paragraph.

bopbeepboop 6y ago
It’s not like that at all. It’s like reporting “chemist solves problem in particle physics” — which is interesting and a bit unexpected, but not at all an unrelated factoid about the person in the way marital status would be.
- tpoacher 6y ago
  Like I said, it's not the news itself, it's the phrasing of the subheading that bothers me. To use your example, it's more like saying "experts surprised female chemist solves problem in particle physics", when "chemist solves problem in particle physics" would have been so much better. But I take your point.
  - bopbeepboop 6y ago
    What word in the subheading do you believe is like “female” in your example? “Postdoctoral”? I’m genuinely confused here. It sounds like “experts surprised professional chemist solves problem in particle physics”. “Professional chemist” is a meaningful title, unlike “female chemist”. The problem with naked “chemist” is that there’s a lot of grades — from student to hobbyist to YouTuber to postdoc to PI for industry lab. How are you interpreting “postdoc” the same way as “female”? One if those is a job; one of those is a biological fact.
gnulinux 6y ago
Absolutely not at all. Statistics and geometry are very different fields. Sure they both use some part of mathematics and an undergrad level statistics and geometry curriculum will have many common classes, but at post-doc level it is definitely surprising. I'm not saying a statistician is not qualified to do research in geometry -- they might be competent enough to do so -- it's just surprising because statistics and geometry work on different problems.