47 ms·

> This might be true, but it's really really hard for someone who doesn't work with them day-to-day to distinguish. It's really not (in mathematics, the field

> This might be true, but it's really really hard for someone who doesn't work with them day-to-day to distinguish. It's really not (in mathematics, the field under discussion). It's not hard to look at the CV of a graduating PhD student in math and tell whether they're a semi-reasonable candidate for the Clay Fellowship, or the other fellowships listed above. Among the small group who makes that cut, of course you need to rely on letters of recommendation, expert assessments, and so on. But the initial cut is fairly straightforward.

nl 4y ago
It's interesting. We were mostly funding at the PhD level, and in computer science. By contrast, I read the links for all the current Clay Fellows[1] and noticed that maybe 60-70% of them had one thing in common: They had proved some long standing (30 year+) conjecture. I agree that's a pretty good sign. Of course the program they did their PhD through is a pretty good initial screen too: Princeton 4 Harvard 4 Standford 1 Imperial College London 1 MIT 1 UT Austin: 1 [1] https://www.claymath.org/fas https://www.claymath.org/fas