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He is totally right and I have seen many many examples of it in grad school. The fact is, US's quantitative GRE is a joke even for mid-high school students in o
by tezka 14y ago
He is totally right and I have seen many many examples of it in grad school. The fact is, US's quantitative GRE is a joke even for mid-high school students in other countries. I take it that he says to become a good scientist in many fields, you don't need Tensors, stochastic PDEs, calculus of variations, group and field theory, functional analysis, path integrals etc. You can get by only mastering single variable calculus, statistics and some basic linear algebra.
- jerryhuang100 14y agoIf that WSJ book promotion op is not disturbing enough about math, here is what PBS summarized [1]: "Mathematical skill is not essential, and neither is a genius IQ, he says. Of more importance is creativity, deep thinking, confidence, commitment and allegiance to the small, informal experiments." And what EO Wilson said himself: "I found out that advances in science rarely come upstream from the ability to stand at a blackboard and conjure images from unfolding mathematical proposition and equations. They are instead the product of downstream imagination leading to hard work, during which mathematical reasoning may or may not prove to be relevant." There is nothing about Calculus, ODE/PDE, stochastic modeling, or whatever. He explicitly refers to mathematical reasoning and skills. I can't wait to see this book promotion op appears on The Colbert Report. [1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/03/post-27.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/03/post-27.html