3 ms·
The cream isn't rising to the top. I doubt many people on HN - never mind in the STEM community a a whole - can name anyone born after 1960 doing research at th
by TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
The cream isn't rising to the top. I doubt many people on HN - never mind in the STEM community a a whole - can name anyone born after 1960 doing research at the level of Dijkstra, Knuth, Hoare, and maybe Wirth.
This either means there's no one that smart or original in the last few generations - possible, but something of a stretch - or the system isn't successfully selecting, motivating, and rewarding people with that level of talent.
My suspicion is that the top people are working in the private sector, and many of them are doing very highly paid but questionably useful work as quants and system engineers.
Building things is fine, but of course it's not academic research - which is defined by the creation of game-changing concepts and philosophical structures, some of which happen to be mathematical.
- impossiblefork 4y agoCook's theorem was 1971, and I think that's a foundational result. Then there's Håstad's work from the 1980s-2010s on lower bounds and optimal non-approximability results. There's Sanjeev Arora, who was one of the guys who worked on the PCP theorem and who has now been writing interesting things about ML. There's Razborov and Rudich, with natural proofs, which was in 1994. There's Khot, who would be up with these guys provided that the UGC is true.