4 ms·

If you look at fields medalists I think most of them got interested in math super young and got exposed earlier to much more material than average mathematician

by klipt 3y ago

If you look at fields medalists I think most of them got interested in math super young and got exposed earlier to much more material than average mathematicians. So they may have an IQ advantage, but they definitely also have a data/training advantage.

quickthrower2 3y ago
You need to be so smart that you jump the chasm between what school can teach you to what you can teach yourself from undergrad and beyond textbooks. Given the pressure to pass exams, in addition you need to have enough in the tank that learning more maths doesn’t risk your hoop jumping to get into university. Ironically you need to do well in many things that isn’t maths to be allowed to study maths at an elite university. I am sure it helps alot if your parents are professors!
naasking 3y ago
> If you look at fields medalists I think most of them got interested in math super young and got exposed earlier to much more material than average mathematicians Even if that were true, you'd need only one Ramanujan to disprove the claim that architecture doesn't matter. We've seen many more than one.
- klipt 3y ago
  It takes both, nature and nurture. If Ramanujan were raised as a goatherd in an illiterate society I don't think he would've accomplished much mathematically.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    Not quite a goatherd, but Ramanujan's father was a clerk in a sari shop. Ramanujan himself had little formal training in mathematics and was entirely self taught, and his research was in isolation until he sent an unsolicited letter to G.H. Hardy. It's as if you trained an LLM on children's books and it converged to Terence Tao.
    - syntheweave 3y ago
      Describing Ramanujan as self-taught downplays that, within colonial India, he had access to some decent resources, and probably more than the median of the era: primary and secondary schooling, some interaction with older students, and a few of the books on higher mathematics. That was enough to open up all the possibilities he needed to "think mathematically". By his late teens it had become a total obsession, he ceased studying other subjects and failed out of academia. That is, the things he had already encountered were sufficient to get him started, and then he made things harder on himself because he couldn't play by the rules. But he replaced that disadvantage with persistence and trial and error, submitting what he had to whomever he could contact until, by the time it reached Hardy, it started to resemble formal language that other mathematicians understood.

by klipt 3y ago

quickthrower2 3y ago

You need to be so smart that you jump the chasm between what school can teach you to what you can teach yourself from undergrad and beyond textbooks. Given the pressure to pass exams, in addition you need to have enough in the tank that learning more maths doesn’t risk your hoop jumping to get into university. Ironically you need to do well in many things that isn’t maths to be allowed to study maths at an elite university. I am sure it helps alot if your parents are professors!

naasking 3y ago

> If you look at fields medalists I think most of them got interested in math super young and got exposed earlier to much more material than average mathematicians Even if that were true, you'd need only one Ramanujan to disprove the claim that architecture doesn't matter. We've seen many more than one.

klipt 3y ago
It takes both, nature and nurture. If Ramanujan were raised as a goatherd in an illiterate society I don't think he would've accomplished much mathematically.
- scarmig 3y ago
  Not quite a goatherd, but Ramanujan's father was a clerk in a sari shop. Ramanujan himself had little formal training in mathematics and was entirely self taught, and his research was in isolation until he sent an unsolicited letter to G.H. Hardy. It's as if you trained an LLM on children's books and it converged to Terence Tao.
  - syntheweave 3y ago
    Describing Ramanujan as self-taught downplays that, within colonial India, he had access to some decent resources, and probably more than the median of the era: primary and secondary schooling, some interaction with older students, and a few of the books on higher mathematics. That was enough to open up all the possibilities he needed to "think mathematically". By his late teens it had become a total obsession, he ceased studying other subjects and failed out of academia. That is, the things he had already encountered were sufficient to get him started, and then he made things harder on himself because he couldn't play by the rules. But he replaced that disadvantage with persistence and trial and error, submitting what he had to whomever he could contact until, by the time it reached Hardy, it started to resemble formal language that other mathematicians understood.