7 ms·

Read the masters

189 points by fpereiro 14y ago

ktizo 14y ago
Three of the links are broke, here are the working versions for those. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd... http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf
- fpereiro 14y ago
  Thank you so much for noticing this! I've just corrected the links.
  - boltenderus 14y ago
    thanks! for this post...really a nice insight.
  - ktizo 14y ago
    No problemo. Am glad that my minor bout of OCD came in useful.
Irishsteve 14y ago
Nice idea, however if you lack fundamental knowledge in an area, prepare for this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ve23i5K334 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ve23i5K334 (P.s sorry about the title. I guess thats how they get more eye balls on it).
- fferen 14y ago
  I'm not sure what the purpose of that was. Clearly, you CAN light a small bulb with a battery and wire, as done in the video and introductory physics classes everywhere. So... is it the fact that the students were unable to figure out that the battery produced insufficient power to light the big bulb? That shows a lack of "fundamental understanding about electricity"? More like a lack of knowledge about power requirements of household light bulbs.
  - Dove 14y ago
    Most of them weren't making a circuit -- just running the wire from one end of the battery to the base of the bulb. That shows a very fundamental lack of understanding of what's going on, without even getting into things like the power requirements of the bulb.
    - fferen 14y ago
      Ah, ok, that makes more sense. I guess I assumed that they only showed the students holding the items after trying, not their actual effort. Now I'm a bit depressed.
    - alberich 14y ago
      I'm not sure they lack such understanding. Isn't this what psychologists call cognitive bias, or something like that? I believe there was a thread here on HK about it, a study showing that people often do irrational things because they assume they know everything. You know? People just think "geez, that is easy..." and rush to answear the first thing that comes to mind, just to discover that they missed the details and feel really stupid :P
  - pliny 14y ago
    I think the 'problem' was that you need two wires to close the circuit.
    - rdl 14y ago
      It's easier to hold one of the contacts of the battery directly on the bulb and one end of a single wire on the bottom of the battery, all with one hand, then use another hand to touch the wire to the other contact on the light bulb. The problem is they didn't intuitively understand bigger light bulbs when operated on lower voltage (and thus lower current). The funny physics answer would be to assemble correctly and then point out that it's lit, just exceedingly dimly (producing mainly IR).
  - Irishsteve 14y ago
    One core message of the video is that when lacking fundamental knowledge, that no matter how 'advanced' your knowledge is, certain processes are beyond your true understanding. So jumping into an advanced topic is good, but you really need to apply rigor to ensure you understand the important fundamentals. Obviously trying to understand everything possible can be inefficient or even unnecessary. All the same its worth considering.
mjn 14y ago
Sometimes this leads to a considerably different flavor as well, which is interesting. Often papers are remembered for their "results", but sometimes the results are only a small part of the paper, and positioned much differently by the original author. This is the case with Turing, for example. If you go by Turing in the secondary literature, he comes across as very mathematical, formal, rigorous. Which he was, but he was also very aesthetically oriented, playful, and philosophical. Many of his original papers are really quite "weird" in a way, at times even allusive/metaphorical. So you get a bit different view of him if you read the originals. (Due credit: I was reminded of that in Turing's case by this article, which aims to convince humanities scholars that they should read Turing: http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/why-arent-we-reading-turing http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/why-arent-we-r...)
AndrewO 14y ago
Or, if the masters are too hard at first, see if their pupils have written annotations. I tried Turing, couldn't even understand why what he was talking about was important (or why his "computers" seem so much... lamer than the ones I was used to), and then found Charles Petzold's "Annotated Turing". http://www.charlespetzold.com/AnnotatedTuring/ http://www.charlespetzold.com/AnnotatedTuring/ He takes Turing's "On Computable Numbers..." and mixes in chapters giving the necessary background on the history of mathematics, number theory, logic, etc. in-line (albeit, it takes about 100 pages to get to the first sentence of Turing's paper). I whole-heartedly recommend it.
- nonviable 14y ago
  Another vote for The Annotated Turing. Really does a great job of shedding light on a rather esoteric paper.
rokhayakebe 14y ago
Or the "original communicators." When you start to read the masters of every field, you realize they are in some sort of a conversation that spans centuries and you get to participate. One problem with this approach is these are dead teachers so no question & answer session for you, and usually the material is hard to comprehend at first. That is exactly what you need it, a material that elevates you, something that pushes you from understanding less to understanding more. Lastly, during this exercise you will find amazingly that there are really only a few original teachers and that most of what we read today are simply digest of what was originally written and discovered by a handful of experts. So it is probably in your best interest to take it straight from the horse's mouth. Yes, I am repeating Adler's How To Read.
- drostie 14y ago
  One of my favorite stories in this vein: You may know that we often read Plato but never read Socrates, and you might have wondered why the hell we don't go back to the 'originals'. Reading Plato's dialogue "Phaedrus" gives an answer near the end: Socrates apparently believed "that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence." Socrates of course was famous for using questions to try and ferret out truth; the idea that you couldn't have a conversation with a book seemed to make Socrates very cautious. He expresses other concerns as well: that memory must be exercised to be strong, and that writing would thus lead to a weakening of memory; also that writing makes it easier to pretend to know something which you don't really understand; and that people will write texts which cannot be used to learn the subject but only can be used as an aid to remember it. Thus ironically, Socrates seemed to believe that books would end the existence of knowledge. This presumably was the reason that he never wrote down his own philosophy, and his students had to do it for him.
  - rokhayakebe 14y ago
    I am currently reading Plato's works (chronologically). As you mention I keep asking myself "why did he not write anything? he knew he was a teacher of virtues." Now I am looking forward to the answer in Phaedrus. Socrates, by means of Plato, Plato, by means of Aristotle, and Aristotle himself are all examples of masters, original communicators. Much of the way we think today, not just the philosophy, but even the mechanism, has to do with their writings. For example it appears the concept that something is either right or wrong comes from Aristotle, and that affects even our laws and sciences where as other cultures may have 4 possibilites: right, wrong, both right and wrong, and neither one nor the other. (I have not verified this, I just heard it last week)
StacyC 14y ago
I’m not a programmer but I loved this line from the post: But if you don’t mind too much feeling like a baby, and if you can create some space in your life where you aren’t forced to be an adult, then give the masters a try. I think this is very good advice for many things.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
I can't agree enough with this, except the part about staying with it. I think sometimes we have to come at the same material from several different directions before it actually makes sense to us. Perhaps it's our preferred mode of learning, or maybe just how old we are and our personality types. Don't know. So for a long time I avoided a lot of the literary masters. As a programmer, I thought they were way too artsy and "fluffy" for my tastes. I wanted something with hard science and boolean logic in it, dammit. But around 40 I listened to the Learning Company's "Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition." It was like a guided tour of a huge amount of masterpieces. From this overview i could pick and choose what to consume. As I read each work, i had already been "prepped" by listening to a lecturer describe what made the work so outstanding. So I picked up "Anna Karenina" Wow! Tolstoy could sketch a character like nobody else. I read some Dickinson. What a great, simple, yet complex way she had of describing inner emotional states! Still couldn't get all of it. Joyce is on my list, but I procrastinate. I had another go at Melville and loved it, but I couldn't generate enough momentum to make it through Moby Dick. Both writing and reading styles have changed. I'd love to learn Greek and have a go at the true classical works, but I will never have the time, sadly. I'm hoping to get another overview or introduction and then make a go at some of the rest of the material. I've loved reading the literary masters. What I find is that you need a preparation or background to really absorb and appreciate the masters. This is the same as having to have a background in baseball to understand a baseball game. Otherwise, without context, it's very difficult to understand what parts work, what parts don't, and where the beauty is. (This is called a liberal education, by the way). The more broad and deep background you have, the more you can appreciate the masters in many fields. Also I'd separate cargo cult liberal arts with actual understanding. To me there's tons of venues that exist to convince you that you're smarter than some other slob. They pitch quite a bit of snob appeal. I'd avoid that. You end up thinking you have class when all you're really doing is running around in a mob consuming whatever was on NPR last week. To me developing a sense of what the crowd thinks is beautiful versus truly coming to a personal grip with the masters is completely missing the point. I'm sure there's a social aspect to art consumption but to me a true master spans the test of time. While it's possible that something can be popular today and 100 years from now, for me using social proof as some form of merit for masterworks is almost diametrically opposed to the entire concept of what makes art truly great in the first place. Fair warning, however: once you start consuming works from the masters it makes mediocre works hard to stomach. Oddly enough, bad material is fine. I still love me some pulp fiction and trashy pop music. It's the stuff that tries to be highbrow but you know is going to be gone with the wind in ten years that's impossible to take.
pbsd 14y ago
This is just a nitpick, but why is SRP (Wu) in your list? Looks a bit out of place there.
- fpereiro 14y ago
  That's a very good question! Although SRP may not be timeless, or even seminal (though I doubt this last statement), I found this paper to be beautifully written. Its concepts are very very clear. Above all, the paper seems to be so alive and enjoyable. For these reasons, besides the practicality of SRP, I suspect that this paper may well turn out to be a classic.
cruise02 14y ago
> Another thing that resonated deeply with me was how Newton studied a book by a French mathematician (I don’t remember which one): he started reading the book – when he found it too hard, he started over. That’s what he did until he understood the whole thing. So, he didn’t go and read something more basic, or tried to found someone who could explain it. He just stayed with the source until he groked it. Approach this advice with caution. Yes, it might work great if you're working with a great book that has good coverage of all the fundamentals of the topic and presents it in a logical order. Many books don't do this. Starting over when you get stuck can just throw you into an endless loop if the required information just isn't in the book you picked to learn from. Know when to branch out to other sources of information instead of looping back. Don't be afraid to make a quick interlude to Wikipedia if you need to. (Personally, I prefer to just backtrack to the information I missed instead of starting over from scratch. Starting over seems to waste a lot of time, but if you missed one concept, there's a chance you missed more.)
- shizzy0 14y ago
  There's a lot to recommend for backtracking. Newton backtracked multiple times to understand the math from an astrology book he picked up. Also, if you're inexperienced, how are you to tell who the Master's are? I fear that whatever book is renowned for its difficulty will become the Master's book. The advice is like, find the steepest slope you can, then climb it. You may not get very far, but you'll feel good that you got anywhere at all.
- silentbicycle 14y ago
  Indeed. Many brilliant, groundbreaking work is produced by geniuses who are lousy writers, so sometimes secondary sources are necessary to get past roadblocks. Still, it's a good reminder to try reading primary sources, when so many people seem to be learning from screencasts and blog posts three degrees removed from them.
  - silentbicycle 14y ago
    "Many brilliant, groundbreaking work is produced...lousy writers." I, um, yeah. Oops.
ekm2 14y ago
A few days ago,i stumbled on Newton's Principia in my college library, and i could not help noticing how accessible he was relative to his pupils.On the very first page,he gives only one rule for finding derivatives that applies in ALL cases plus worked out examples on how it works.I felt like i had wasted too much of my time in college reading too many useless tomes.
- hardy263 14y ago
  Can you explain what rule this is? I'm highly curious as to what rule can solve all derivatives, and it might be useful for me.
  - shasta 14y ago
    f'(x) = lim h->0 (f(x+h)-f(x))/h
    - thesnider 14y ago
      If that's the really the rule ekm2 is referencing, the rest of his comment falls apart. This rule is found in the first section about derivatives in any college or high school calculus textbook. They lead you on for a good many pages that calculus problems are actually practically solved by reference to this equation, then grudgingly admit (after forcing you to use it many times) that the power rule, among others, exists.
      - jasomill 14y ago
        I assume he's referring to this [1], although Newton invented his calculus because he couldn't use this approach to solve practical problems. [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Principles_of_Natural_Philosophy_(1846)/BookI-I http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Principles_of...
  - jasomill 14y ago
    Sure: the line tangent to any point on a smooth curve approximates a sufficiently small bit of the curve surrounding the point arbitrarily well. Newton's contribution wasn't this, however, but the extension of Descartes' algebraic tangent-finding methods to curves represented by "infinite polynomials", which he neither uses nor explains in the Principia. If you're looking to learn Newton's flavor of calculus "from the master", here it is: http://archive.org/details/methodoffluxions00newt http://archive.org/details/methodoffluxions00newt
eshvk 14y ago
This is so true: I remember in high school studying calculus from a random book which made me think that calculus was about was a bunch of tricks for doing integration and differentiation. A few years later when I first start working through Spivak's excellent book on Calculus, It was one of the hardest things I had ever done but the sheer magnificent beauty of the structure on which most of modern calculus is built on and how it gradually evolved comes to light. It is really both a journey in history and time and building mental models that reoccur through so many branches of mathematics.
EricDeb 14y ago
I actually believe the mindset this author has (along with many university professors) makes learning far more difficult for students and discourages them from staying in STEM (math and science) degrees. I have consistently found that for me to tackle difficult concepts I need multiple points of view, specifically views that simplify the topic tremendously. My professors never encouraged me to seek multiple sources and usually pushed overly complex, decades-old textbooks on my peers and I. The "masters" typically write to a niche, university-based audience and do not tailor their original works for the masses. I certainly agree that if one wants a complete understanding of a field or subject they should eventually study original works, however to encourage them as a starting or leverage point for understanding difficult subjects is poor advice in my opinion.
- pm90 14y ago
  I completely agree. As a high-school student, I was completely turned off by the quality of books that I was reading ('textbooks that conform to the curriculum set by the education board'). It was only when I started reading the masters (in this case Resnick Halliday for physics, Thomas & Finney for calculus) that I really started to like math and physics and chose to major in engineering
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onemach 14y ago
The list of the article reminds me of this post http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-papers-should-everyone-read http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-papers...
SiVal 14y ago
More silly, macho, "real programmer" nonsense. It's like saying that the best way to learn calculus is to pick up a calculus book in first grade and read it over and over until it all becomes clear. Yeah, that's the express lane to mastery. If you want to master something, sequentially master its prerequisites and methodically work your way up. If you do that, then a lot of the ideas of the masters will have begun occurring to you before you even read their works, and you will be the sort of person they were writing for.
- warmwaffles 14y ago
  This is why you look at the related works section first. If you don't know any of them, go find those articles and do your favorite recursive look up of those articles until you find documents that you can grok. At that point you work forward, annotating, high lighting, and answering a few questions like: * What is the take away message? * What is the people problem? * What questions does this leave you with? * What previous questions were answered?
- jasomill 14y ago
  Trouble with this is that prerequisites differ. I taught myself multivariable calculus out of a differential geometry textbook that I lacked roughly an entire degree's worth of "prerequisites" to, in order to pass a bog-standard calculus course, because I found the ostensibly "easier" approach advocated by the undergraduate calc book utterly incomprehensible.
skardan 14y ago
There is an interesting question. Does the advice "read the masters" also applies to teaching? My teacher at university pointed me to Moore's method named by great american mathematician Robert Lee Moore. Moore selected students without previous knowledge of the subject and let them "invent" the subject - definition, theorems, proofs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Moore#Unusual_teacher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Moore#Unusual_teache... So great teachers do not "teach masters" but rather teach to "think like masters". If you know how to think, "reading the master" feels more like a dialogue.
olalonde 14y ago
Be cautious when reading the "classics" of fields such as physics or philosophy (unless you are interested in the history of the field). Socrates was wrong about a few things and so was Einstein.
shizzy0 14y ago
When he writes that Newton too just read and re-read through the Master's, he's wrong. "How Newton was introduced to the most advanced mathematical texts of his day is slightly less clear. According to de Moivre, Newton's interest in mathematics began in the autumn of 1663 when he bought an astrology book at a fair in Cambridge and found that he could not understand the mathematics in it. Attempting to read a trigonometry book, he found that he lacked knowledge of geometry and so decided to read Barrow's edition of Euclid's Elements." http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Newton.html http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Newton.html When Newton failed to grasp something, he backtracked. When he failed to understand that, he backtracked again. I think many people when confronted with a failure of understanding may be disinclined, throw their hands up, and say, this isn't for me. Newton, instead, continued to work his way back up the chain until he found material that helped him understand. I think this article does a disservice to the lessons we might learn from Newton by suggesting that he just smashed his head against the same book until he understood it.
- brodney 14y ago
  I think the argument here isn't to reread a trigonometry book until you get it, regardless of your knowledge of the prereqs. The message I took is to find the book written by a/the master in the field of trigonometry, living or dead, in order to learn trig. If you don't yet understand geometry which is needed to understand trig, then find a book by the most renowned scholar in geometry. It's sort of like that telephone game we play in elementary school, where the message gets passed around the room and ends up nothing like it started. Learn from the source of these insights, not from someone else who learned it and is giving you their interpretation.

189 points by fpereiro 14y ago

ktizo 14y ago

Three of the links are broke, here are the working versions for those. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd... http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf

fpereiro 14y ago
Thank you so much for noticing this! I've just corrected the links.
- boltenderus 14y ago
  thanks! for this post...really a nice insight.
- ktizo 14y ago
  No problemo. Am glad that my minor bout of OCD came in useful.

Irishsteve 14y ago

Nice idea, however if you lack fundamental knowledge in an area, prepare for this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ve23i5K334 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ve23i5K334 (P.s sorry about the title. I guess thats how they get more eye balls on it).

fferen 14y ago
I'm not sure what the purpose of that was. Clearly, you CAN light a small bulb with a battery and wire, as done in the video and introductory physics classes everywhere. So... is it the fact that the students were unable to figure out that the battery produced insufficient power to light the big bulb? That shows a lack of "fundamental understanding about electricity"? More like a lack of knowledge about power requirements of household light bulbs.
- Dove 14y ago
  Most of them weren't making a circuit -- just running the wire from one end of the battery to the base of the bulb. That shows a very fundamental lack of understanding of what's going on, without even getting into things like the power requirements of the bulb.
  - fferen 14y ago
    Ah, ok, that makes more sense. I guess I assumed that they only showed the students holding the items after trying, not their actual effort. Now I'm a bit depressed.
  - alberich 14y ago
    I'm not sure they lack such understanding. Isn't this what psychologists call cognitive bias, or something like that? I believe there was a thread here on HK about it, a study showing that people often do irrational things because they assume they know everything. You know? People just think "geez, that is easy..." and rush to answear the first thing that comes to mind, just to discover that they missed the details and feel really stupid :P
- pliny 14y ago
  I think the 'problem' was that you need two wires to close the circuit.
  - rdl 14y ago
    It's easier to hold one of the contacts of the battery directly on the bulb and one end of a single wire on the bottom of the battery, all with one hand, then use another hand to touch the wire to the other contact on the light bulb. The problem is they didn't intuitively understand bigger light bulbs when operated on lower voltage (and thus lower current). The funny physics answer would be to assemble correctly and then point out that it's lit, just exceedingly dimly (producing mainly IR).
- Irishsteve 14y ago
  One core message of the video is that when lacking fundamental knowledge, that no matter how 'advanced' your knowledge is, certain processes are beyond your true understanding. So jumping into an advanced topic is good, but you really need to apply rigor to ensure you understand the important fundamentals. Obviously trying to understand everything possible can be inefficient or even unnecessary. All the same its worth considering.

mjn 14y ago

Sometimes this leads to a considerably different flavor as well, which is interesting. Often papers are remembered for their "results", but sometimes the results are only a small part of the paper, and positioned much differently by the original author. This is the case with Turing, for example. If you go by Turing in the secondary literature, he comes across as very mathematical, formal, rigorous. Which he was, but he was also very aesthetically oriented, playful, and philosophical. Many of his original papers are really quite "weird" in a way, at times even allusive/metaphorical. So you get a bit different view of him if you read the originals. (Due credit: I was reminded of that in Turing's case by this article, which aims to convince humanities scholars that they should read Turing: http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/why-arent-we-reading-turing http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/why-arent-we-r...)

AndrewO 14y ago

Or, if the masters are too hard at first, see if their pupils have written annotations. I tried Turing, couldn't even understand why what he was talking about was important (or why his "computers" seem so much... lamer than the ones I was used to), and then found Charles Petzold's "Annotated Turing". http://www.charlespetzold.com/AnnotatedTuring/ http://www.charlespetzold.com/AnnotatedTuring/ He takes Turing's "On Computable Numbers..." and mixes in chapters giving the necessary background on the history of mathematics, number theory, logic, etc. in-line (albeit, it takes about 100 pages to get to the first sentence of Turing's paper). I whole-heartedly recommend it.

nonviable 14y ago
Another vote for The Annotated Turing. Really does a great job of shedding light on a rather esoteric paper.

rokhayakebe 14y ago

Or the "original communicators." When you start to read the masters of every field, you realize they are in some sort of a conversation that spans centuries and you get to participate. One problem with this approach is these are dead teachers so no question & answer session for you, and usually the material is hard to comprehend at first. That is exactly what you need it, a material that elevates you, something that pushes you from understanding less to understanding more. Lastly, during this exercise you will find amazingly that there are really only a few original teachers and that most of what we read today are simply digest of what was originally written and discovered by a handful of experts. So it is probably in your best interest to take it straight from the horse's mouth. Yes, I am repeating Adler's How To Read.

drostie 14y ago
One of my favorite stories in this vein: You may know that we often read Plato but never read Socrates, and you might have wondered why the hell we don't go back to the 'originals'. Reading Plato's dialogue "Phaedrus" gives an answer near the end: Socrates apparently believed "that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence." Socrates of course was famous for using questions to try and ferret out truth; the idea that you couldn't have a conversation with a book seemed to make Socrates very cautious. He expresses other concerns as well: that memory must be exercised to be strong, and that writing would thus lead to a weakening of memory; also that writing makes it easier to pretend to know something which you don't really understand; and that people will write texts which cannot be used to learn the subject but only can be used as an aid to remember it. Thus ironically, Socrates seemed to believe that books would end the existence of knowledge. This presumably was the reason that he never wrote down his own philosophy, and his students had to do it for him.
- rokhayakebe 14y ago
  I am currently reading Plato's works (chronologically). As you mention I keep asking myself "why did he not write anything? he knew he was a teacher of virtues." Now I am looking forward to the answer in Phaedrus. Socrates, by means of Plato, Plato, by means of Aristotle, and Aristotle himself are all examples of masters, original communicators. Much of the way we think today, not just the philosophy, but even the mechanism, has to do with their writings. For example it appears the concept that something is either right or wrong comes from Aristotle, and that affects even our laws and sciences where as other cultures may have 4 possibilites: right, wrong, both right and wrong, and neither one nor the other. (I have not verified this, I just heard it last week)

StacyC 14y ago

I’m not a programmer but I loved this line from the post: But if you don’t mind too much feeling like a baby, and if you can create some space in your life where you aren’t forced to be an adult, then give the masters a try. I think this is very good advice for many things.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

I can't agree enough with this, except the part about staying with it. I think sometimes we have to come at the same material from several different directions before it actually makes sense to us. Perhaps it's our preferred mode of learning, or maybe just how old we are and our personality types. Don't know. So for a long time I avoided a lot of the literary masters. As a programmer, I thought they were way too artsy and "fluffy" for my tastes. I wanted something with hard science and boolean logic in it, dammit. But around 40 I listened to the Learning Company's "Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition." It was like a guided tour of a huge amount of masterpieces. From this overview i could pick and choose what to consume. As I read each work, i had already been "prepped" by listening to a lecturer describe what made the work so outstanding. So I picked up "Anna Karenina" Wow! Tolstoy could sketch a character like nobody else. I read some Dickinson. What a great, simple, yet complex way she had of describing inner emotional states! Still couldn't get all of it. Joyce is on my list, but I procrastinate. I had another go at Melville and loved it, but I couldn't generate enough momentum to make it through Moby Dick. Both writing and reading styles have changed. I'd love to learn Greek and have a go at the true classical works, but I will never have the time, sadly. I'm hoping to get another overview or introduction and then make a go at some of the rest of the material. I've loved reading the literary masters. What I find is that you need a preparation or background to really absorb and appreciate the masters. This is the same as having to have a background in baseball to understand a baseball game. Otherwise, without context, it's very difficult to understand what parts work, what parts don't, and where the beauty is. (This is called a liberal education, by the way). The more broad and deep background you have, the more you can appreciate the masters in many fields. Also I'd separate cargo cult liberal arts with actual understanding. To me there's tons of venues that exist to convince you that you're smarter than some other slob. They pitch quite a bit of snob appeal. I'd avoid that. You end up thinking you have class when all you're really doing is running around in a mob consuming whatever was on NPR last week. To me developing a sense of what the crowd thinks is beautiful versus truly coming to a personal grip with the masters is completely missing the point. I'm sure there's a social aspect to art consumption but to me a true master spans the test of time. While it's possible that something can be popular today and 100 years from now, for me using social proof as some form of merit for masterworks is almost diametrically opposed to the entire concept of what makes art truly great in the first place. Fair warning, however: once you start consuming works from the masters it makes mediocre works hard to stomach. Oddly enough, bad material is fine. I still love me some pulp fiction and trashy pop music. It's the stuff that tries to be highbrow but you know is going to be gone with the wind in ten years that's impossible to take.

pbsd 14y ago

This is just a nitpick, but why is SRP (Wu) in your list? Looks a bit out of place there.

fpereiro 14y ago
That's a very good question! Although SRP may not be timeless, or even seminal (though I doubt this last statement), I found this paper to be beautifully written. Its concepts are very very clear. Above all, the paper seems to be so alive and enjoyable. For these reasons, besides the practicality of SRP, I suspect that this paper may well turn out to be a classic.

cruise02 14y ago

> Another thing that resonated deeply with me was how Newton studied a book by a French mathematician (I don’t remember which one): he started reading the book – when he found it too hard, he started over. That’s what he did until he understood the whole thing. So, he didn’t go and read something more basic, or tried to found someone who could explain it. He just stayed with the source until he groked it. Approach this advice with caution. Yes, it might work great if you're working with a great book that has good coverage of all the fundamentals of the topic and presents it in a logical order. Many books don't do this. Starting over when you get stuck can just throw you into an endless loop if the required information just isn't in the book you picked to learn from. Know when to branch out to other sources of information instead of looping back. Don't be afraid to make a quick interlude to Wikipedia if you need to. (Personally, I prefer to just backtrack to the information I missed instead of starting over from scratch. Starting over seems to waste a lot of time, but if you missed one concept, there's a chance you missed more.)

shizzy0 14y ago
There's a lot to recommend for backtracking. Newton backtracked multiple times to understand the math from an astrology book he picked up. Also, if you're inexperienced, how are you to tell who the Master's are? I fear that whatever book is renowned for its difficulty will become the Master's book. The advice is like, find the steepest slope you can, then climb it. You may not get very far, but you'll feel good that you got anywhere at all.
silentbicycle 14y ago
Indeed. Many brilliant, groundbreaking work is produced by geniuses who are lousy writers, so sometimes secondary sources are necessary to get past roadblocks. Still, it's a good reminder to try reading primary sources, when so many people seem to be learning from screencasts and blog posts three degrees removed from them.
- silentbicycle 14y ago
  "Many brilliant, groundbreaking work is produced...lousy writers." I, um, yeah. Oops.

ekm2 14y ago

A few days ago,i stumbled on Newton's Principia in my college library, and i could not help noticing how accessible he was relative to his pupils.On the very first page,he gives only one rule for finding derivatives that applies in ALL cases plus worked out examples on how it works.I felt like i had wasted too much of my time in college reading too many useless tomes.

hardy263 14y ago
Can you explain what rule this is? I'm highly curious as to what rule can solve all derivatives, and it might be useful for me.
- shasta 14y ago
  f'(x) = lim h->0 (f(x+h)-f(x))/h
  - thesnider 14y ago
    If that's the really the rule ekm2 is referencing, the rest of his comment falls apart. This rule is found in the first section about derivatives in any college or high school calculus textbook. They lead you on for a good many pages that calculus problems are actually practically solved by reference to this equation, then grudgingly admit (after forcing you to use it many times) that the power rule, among others, exists.
    - jasomill 14y ago
      I assume he's referring to this [1], although Newton invented his calculus because he couldn't use this approach to solve practical problems. [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Principles_of_Natural_Philosophy_(1846)/BookI-I http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Principles_of...
- jasomill 14y ago
  Sure: the line tangent to any point on a smooth curve approximates a sufficiently small bit of the curve surrounding the point arbitrarily well. Newton's contribution wasn't this, however, but the extension of Descartes' algebraic tangent-finding methods to curves represented by "infinite polynomials", which he neither uses nor explains in the Principia. If you're looking to learn Newton's flavor of calculus "from the master", here it is: http://archive.org/details/methodoffluxions00newt http://archive.org/details/methodoffluxions00newt

eshvk 14y ago

This is so true: I remember in high school studying calculus from a random book which made me think that calculus was about was a bunch of tricks for doing integration and differentiation. A few years later when I first start working through Spivak's excellent book on Calculus, It was one of the hardest things I had ever done but the sheer magnificent beauty of the structure on which most of modern calculus is built on and how it gradually evolved comes to light. It is really both a journey in history and time and building mental models that reoccur through so many branches of mathematics.

EricDeb 14y ago

I actually believe the mindset this author has (along with many university professors) makes learning far more difficult for students and discourages them from staying in STEM (math and science) degrees. I have consistently found that for me to tackle difficult concepts I need multiple points of view, specifically views that simplify the topic tremendously. My professors never encouraged me to seek multiple sources and usually pushed overly complex, decades-old textbooks on my peers and I. The "masters" typically write to a niche, university-based audience and do not tailor their original works for the masses. I certainly agree that if one wants a complete understanding of a field or subject they should eventually study original works, however to encourage them as a starting or leverage point for understanding difficult subjects is poor advice in my opinion.

pm90 14y ago
I completely agree. As a high-school student, I was completely turned off by the quality of books that I was reading ('textbooks that conform to the curriculum set by the education board'). It was only when I started reading the masters (in this case Resnick Halliday for physics, Thomas & Finney for calculus) that I really started to like math and physics and chose to major in engineering

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onemach 14y ago

The list of the article reminds me of this post http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-papers-should-everyone-read http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-papers...

SiVal 14y ago

More silly, macho, "real programmer" nonsense. It's like saying that the best way to learn calculus is to pick up a calculus book in first grade and read it over and over until it all becomes clear. Yeah, that's the express lane to mastery. If you want to master something, sequentially master its prerequisites and methodically work your way up. If you do that, then a lot of the ideas of the masters will have begun occurring to you before you even read their works, and you will be the sort of person they were writing for.

warmwaffles 14y ago
This is why you look at the related works section first. If you don't know any of them, go find those articles and do your favorite recursive look up of those articles until you find documents that you can grok. At that point you work forward, annotating, high lighting, and answering a few questions like: * What is the take away message? * What is the people problem? * What questions does this leave you with? * What previous questions were answered?
jasomill 14y ago
Trouble with this is that prerequisites differ. I taught myself multivariable calculus out of a differential geometry textbook that I lacked roughly an entire degree's worth of "prerequisites" to, in order to pass a bog-standard calculus course, because I found the ostensibly "easier" approach advocated by the undergraduate calc book utterly incomprehensible.

skardan 14y ago

There is an interesting question. Does the advice "read the masters" also applies to teaching? My teacher at university pointed me to Moore's method named by great american mathematician Robert Lee Moore. Moore selected students without previous knowledge of the subject and let them "invent" the subject - definition, theorems, proofs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Moore#Unusual_teacher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Moore#Unusual_teache... So great teachers do not "teach masters" but rather teach to "think like masters". If you know how to think, "reading the master" feels more like a dialogue.

olalonde 14y ago

Be cautious when reading the "classics" of fields such as physics or philosophy (unless you are interested in the history of the field). Socrates was wrong about a few things and so was Einstein.

shizzy0 14y ago

When he writes that Newton too just read and re-read through the Master's, he's wrong. "How Newton was introduced to the most advanced mathematical texts of his day is slightly less clear. According to de Moivre, Newton's interest in mathematics began in the autumn of 1663 when he bought an astrology book at a fair in Cambridge and found that he could not understand the mathematics in it. Attempting to read a trigonometry book, he found that he lacked knowledge of geometry and so decided to read Barrow's edition of Euclid's Elements." http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Newton.html http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Newton.html When Newton failed to grasp something, he backtracked. When he failed to understand that, he backtracked again. I think many people when confronted with a failure of understanding may be disinclined, throw their hands up, and say, this isn't for me. Newton, instead, continued to work his way back up the chain until he found material that helped him understand. I think this article does a disservice to the lessons we might learn from Newton by suggesting that he just smashed his head against the same book until he understood it.

brodney 14y ago
I think the argument here isn't to reread a trigonometry book until you get it, regardless of your knowledge of the prereqs. The message I took is to find the book written by a/the master in the field of trigonometry, living or dead, in order to learn trig. If you don't yet understand geometry which is needed to understand trig, then find a book by the most renowned scholar in geometry. It's sort of like that telephone game we play in elementary school, where the message gets passed around the room and ends up nothing like it started. Learn from the source of these insights, not from someone else who learned it and is giving you their interpretation.