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He was the president of the institute, and a tenured physics professor.

by MichaelCrawford 11y ago

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
Yeah but he's not the pope.
- dalke 11y ago
  I think you have the same confusion I did. MichaelCrawford appears to be showing off via name dropping, rather than providing useful information, which is what I expected. There is a common misperception that Einstein was lousy at math. Some sources say it's because the Swiss and German systems both use a numerical scale, but in opposite directions, so what looks like an excellent grade in one is lousy in the others. Others conjecture that it was because he didn't originally think that high mathematics was important for physics, so was considered a lazy student. (See http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Albert-Einstein-failed-in-mathematics-many-times-during-his-school-days http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Albert-Einstein-failed-... for various comments.) It seems that MichaelCrawford is unaware of this misperception, as the claim that Einstein was "appallingly poor at arithmetic" is attributed only be reputation of the speaker of said claim. While that may be a good first step, anyone who was aware of the misperception would know it is necessary to have stronger evidence to remove doubt. Such evidence does not exist. Instead, we see that MichaelCrawford doubles down by appealing again to authority, instead of doing a search for "Einstein bad at arithmeic". All 10 of the first hits from Google describe how Einstein was not bad at algebra and how such a belief - even when expressed by a tenured CalTech professor - is simply wrong. In http://io9.com/the-math-problem-that-had-einstein-asking-for-help-from-1443667839 http://io9.com/the-math-problem-that-had-einstein-asking-for... we even see a case where Einstein did get the math wrong - he had miscalculated coefficient of friction. Had he been "appallingly poor at arithmetic" there would be many more, and much more clear, examples of arithmetic errors.

He was the president of the institute, and a tenured physics professor.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

Yeah but he's not the pope.

dalke 11y ago
I think you have the same confusion I did. MichaelCrawford appears to be showing off via name dropping, rather than providing useful information, which is what I expected. There is a common misperception that Einstein was lousy at math. Some sources say it's because the Swiss and German systems both use a numerical scale, but in opposite directions, so what looks like an excellent grade in one is lousy in the others. Others conjecture that it was because he didn't originally think that high mathematics was important for physics, so was considered a lazy student. (See http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Albert-Einstein-failed-in-mathematics-many-times-during-his-school-days http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Albert-Einstein-failed-... for various comments.) It seems that MichaelCrawford is unaware of this misperception, as the claim that Einstein was "appallingly poor at arithmetic" is attributed only be reputation of the speaker of said claim. While that may be a good first step, anyone who was aware of the misperception would know it is necessary to have stronger evidence to remove doubt. Such evidence does not exist. Instead, we see that MichaelCrawford doubles down by appealing again to authority, instead of doing a search for "Einstein bad at arithmeic". All 10 of the first hits from Google describe how Einstein was not bad at algebra and how such a belief - even when expressed by a tenured CalTech professor - is simply wrong. In http://io9.com/the-math-problem-that-had-einstein-asking-for-help-from-1443667839 http://io9.com/the-math-problem-that-had-einstein-asking-for... we even see a case where Einstein did get the math wrong - he had miscalculated coefficient of friction. Had he been "appallingly poor at arithmetic" there would be many more, and much more clear, examples of arithmetic errors.