4 ms·

What kind of kindergarten did this guy go to? 'In kindergarten, we all learned Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem, which given a formal system F, constructs

What kind of kindergarten did this guy go to? 'In kindergarten, we all learned Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem, which given a formal system F, constructs an arithmetical encoding of G(F) = “This sentence is not provable in F.”'

elliotec 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Aaronson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Aaronson > Aaronson grew up in the United States, though he spent a year in Asia when his father—a science writer turned public-relations executive—was posted to Hong Kong. He enrolled in a school there that permitted him to skip ahead several years in math, but upon returning to the US, he found his education restrictive, getting bad grades and having run-ins with teachers. He enrolled in The Clarkson School, a gifted education program run by Clarkson University, which enabled Aaronson to apply for colleges while only in his freshman year of high school. He was accepted into Cornell University, where he obtained his BSc in computer science in 2000, and where he resided at the Telluride House. He then attended the University of California, Berkeley, for his PhD, which he got in 2004 under the supervision of Umesh Vazirani. > Aaronson had shown ability in mathematics from an early age, teaching himself calculus at the age of 11, provoked by symbols in a babysitter's textbook. He discovered computer programming at age 11, and felt he lagged behind peers, who had already been coding for years. In part due to Aaronson getting into advanced mathematics before getting into computer programming, he felt drawn to theoretical computing, particularly computational complexity theory. At Cornell, he became interested in quantum computing and devoted himself to computational complexity and quantum computing. His kindergarten was clearly different than ours :D
- chatterhead 4y ago
  Yeah... I learned to share. Mostly.
- mgaunard 4y ago
  Was it? That seems pretty standard actually.
bawolff 4y ago
Y'all never heard of using hyperbole as a rhetorical device?
- pasquinelli 4y ago
  what's the rhetorical objective in using this rhetorical device? if there isn't one then it's not a rhetorical device. to me it just sounds a little cutesy.
  - Sharlin 4y ago
    It’s just humor.
H8crilA 4y ago
It's a joke.
pdpi 4y ago
That read to me as deliberately absurd. Aaronson's academic journey was... fairly nonstandard. The circumstances under which he learnt about this are likely to be correspondingly nonstandard. "We all learned about Gödel in our Undergrad/Highschool/Grad School/whatever else" will easily come across as either condescending or arrogant. Kindergarten strikes me as an amusingly flippant way of saying something closer to "at some point in our academic journeys".

elliotec 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Aaronson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Aaronson > Aaronson grew up in the United States, though he spent a year in Asia when his father—a science writer turned public-relations executive—was posted to Hong Kong. He enrolled in a school there that permitted him to skip ahead several years in math, but upon returning to the US, he found his education restrictive, getting bad grades and having run-ins with teachers. He enrolled in The Clarkson School, a gifted education program run by Clarkson University, which enabled Aaronson to apply for colleges while only in his freshman year of high school. He was accepted into Cornell University, where he obtained his BSc in computer science in 2000, and where he resided at the Telluride House. He then attended the University of California, Berkeley, for his PhD, which he got in 2004 under the supervision of Umesh Vazirani. > Aaronson had shown ability in mathematics from an early age, teaching himself calculus at the age of 11, provoked by symbols in a babysitter's textbook. He discovered computer programming at age 11, and felt he lagged behind peers, who had already been coding for years. In part due to Aaronson getting into advanced mathematics before getting into computer programming, he felt drawn to theoretical computing, particularly computational complexity theory. At Cornell, he became interested in quantum computing and devoted himself to computational complexity and quantum computing. His kindergarten was clearly different than ours :D

chatterhead 4y ago
Yeah... I learned to share. Mostly.
mgaunard 4y ago
Was it? That seems pretty standard actually.

bawolff 4y ago

Y'all never heard of using hyperbole as a rhetorical device?

pasquinelli 4y ago
what's the rhetorical objective in using this rhetorical device? if there isn't one then it's not a rhetorical device. to me it just sounds a little cutesy.
- Sharlin 4y ago
  It’s just humor.

H8crilA 4y ago

It's a joke.

pdpi 4y ago

That read to me as deliberately absurd. Aaronson's academic journey was... fairly nonstandard. The circumstances under which he learnt about this are likely to be correspondingly nonstandard. "We all learned about Gödel in our Undergrad/Highschool/Grad School/whatever else" will easily come across as either condescending or arrogant. Kindergarten strikes me as an amusingly flippant way of saying something closer to "at some point in our academic journeys".