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The bar for math PhDs already ruled out like 99.9% of the population, so I don't see it having much effect on discouraging people. The gap between even a bright
by ndriscoll 3mo ago
The bar for math PhDs already ruled out like 99.9% of the population, so I don't see it having much effect on discouraging people. The gap between even a bright student who takes AP calculus or whatever and someone studying e.g. spectral sequences is already incomprehensibly large. Like you literally could not even convey to a smart young person how far away they are from the boundary of today's understanding. I don't think I even have a reasonable sense with a math bachelor's!
People who get into math do it because they can't not do it.
- ian-g 3mo agoI think it'll become increasingly important to have folks thinking about how to explain new math in a way that makes sense to your math bachelors students. And to your bright AP Calc students. If we can point ChatGPT at these problems and get eventual answers, that's awesome, but it'll still be important to figure out how to tell people why this matters in ways they understand.
- ConceptJunkie 3mo agoI'll look at math papers on Arxiv, etc., and browsing the titles will find maybe one in a hundred where I even know what it's talking about. I've been a math enthusiast since I was a kid, but the field is so immense I can't even wrap my head around how big it is, leave alone the actual concepts. Out of all the topics mentioned in the recent AI advances at finding counterexamples to conjectures, etc., about the only one I understood was the one where they've made advances in a bounds for kissing numbers in higher dimension, a topic I find fascinating even if I don't really know much about it.