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Mathematics can certainly be learned outside of a university. Look at Ramanujan. Or go find any math professor at a decent university and ask if the majority of
by mark-t 18y ago
Mathematics can certainly be learned outside of a university. Look at Ramanujan. Or go find any math professor at a decent university and ask if the majority of his/her learning happened in the classroom. You'll get a resounding no, if not laughter.
- run4yourlives 18y agoCertainly. Mathematics is a bad example, but the theory holds for other concepts. Math, like CS and say, any of the arts, live on their own. I think then what we have is perhaps an improper classification: Math and Computer Science are arts! :-0
- sethg 18y agoWell, someone did once propose instituting an MFA program for programmers, in which the emphasis would be on practicing The Art Of Programming under the guidance of mentors, rather than on learning theory. http://www.dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html http://www.dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html
- tptacek 18y agoRamanujan: exception proving the rule. A huge chunk --- maybe 30-40% --- of dev practitioners aren't degreed in CS.
- Hexstream 18y ago"Mathematics can certainly be learned outside of a university. Look at Ramanujan." I don't think illustrating your point by naming an absolute mathematical genius is very optimal.
- mark-t 18y agoI think ideas like "Oh, that guy was a genius. Normal people could never do that." are fundamentally misguided. He worked tirelessly on mathematics, filling notebooks in his spare time for the pure joy of it. If you can find somebody else with that kind of devotion to mathematics who is hopelessly average at it, that would be something. I mentioned Ramanujan because he's famous, and he obviously didn't get it from taking university classes. I used to do math competitions in high school, and I'd meet the best students in the state or country. You know what? All of us learned the same way Ramanujan did: we read number theory books for fun, continually asked questions that were interesting to us, and then worked on them until we answered them. Not a single person in the group learned by attending lectures or even through supervision by experts. It's just not how it happens. That's the point I was trying to make concisely before.