impendia

85 ms·

841.
by impendia 14y ago
I am an academic mathematician. Happily, I have observed little of what you described. Ego, sure, but pettiness and vindictiveness, no.
842.
by impendia 14y ago
Regarding your last point: possibly technical ignorance on my part, but is there some reason signing up for, say, a gmail account doesn't suffice?
843.
by impendia 14y ago
Okay, please tell me what I should do instead, if you grant me: (1) I cannot easily garner which big corporations are "evil" and which are good. I do not have any practical way of finding out about hotels elsewhere without going through som
844.
by impendia 14y ago
I am a typical travel customer. I often go to conferences and book hotels in unfamiliar cities. I am very sympathetic to this story. And yet -- at the end -- >either use the internet to do the research or go to a reputable travel agent.
845.
by impendia 14y ago
I love personality tests, I find them addictive, I've taken the Myers-Briggs test at least half a dozen times at various times in my life, with results from INTJ to ENFP and everything in between. One flaw in the test is that it doesn't dis
846.
by impendia 14y ago
> both were unwilling to lift a finger to help outside of class. > I found both obnoxiously holier-than-thou; very much the condescending academics. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I would urge you to be slower to judgement. I have
847.
by impendia 14y ago
> Writing a letter to the dean will work because in academics all those professors secretly or not so secretly don't like each other. -1. There are some haters out there, but I object vehemently to the use of the word "all". I don't hav
848.
by impendia 14y ago
I'm a professor in a math department. We have some pretty bad teachers. Every department does. That said, "bad" is subjective. Here is my RateMyProfessors page: http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1631570 One complainer sa
849.
by impendia 14y ago
I respectfully disagree. In the first place, Harvard (and other prestigious universities) have excellent financial aid, and OP will only pay $58,000/year if his parents are wealthy enough to afford it. Student loans suck, but I think it is
850.
by impendia 14y ago
I'm going to disagree with a lot of other commenters: In my experience, a top-notch education is enormously valuable, and where you go to school very much matters. I applied for grad schools in math, my first choice was MIT. I was very disa
851.
by impendia 14y ago
It only assumes that single characters are desirable variable names. Especially if (as in Lisp) one does not draw a conceptual distinction between variables and functions, it is common to see multi-letter variable names. Here is a typical e
852.
by impendia 14y ago
We use Greek characters simply because it's convenient to have additional symbols at hand. The choice of Greek is historic, but one also sees a little bit of Cyrillic and Hebrew. Notation has evolved since ancient Greece. Euclid, for exampl
853.
by impendia 14y ago
What exactly is this "sturdy common sense"? I am a mathematics professor, and I have the opportunity to work at what I love. Why should I forego this to instead do "the common work of the world"? If the only paying job available to me were
854.
by impendia 14y ago
I looked at it, I could imagine being interested in such a site, but I was not able to see anything I couldn't find by Yelp or Google. Some questions I might be interested in finding answers to: * Does this church have large number of singl
855.
by impendia 14y ago
This looks fantastic. I live in a duplex, and I would most definitely consider using this when my tenants move out and I have to find new ones. How do you plan to make a good profit? It seems like you not only have to maintain a website, bu
856.
by impendia 14y ago
I am not sure I understand all of your questions, but I assure you that if people believed there was a high chance that the proof was correct, then they would be very eager to read it. Mathematicians, and especially the very best mathematic
857.
by impendia 14y ago
+1, you ask a very important question, which I can at least sort of answer. I think it's key to understanding why many experts think Mochizuki's work is likely to be wrong. I cannot really give a complete explanation, being unfamiliar with
858.
by impendia 14y ago
Math person here. >Wait, so you're saying it's easier for humans to prove complex theorems than computers? Of course! If proving theorems could be readily automated, this would have been done already. Indeed, automation has succeeded fo
859.
by impendia 14y ago
Now I'm curious. What is Cluckbutton?
860.
by impendia 14y ago
Plausible, but it turns out to be mistaken. Look at this map of results in South Carolina: http://www.politico.com/2012-election/map/#/President/2012/S... County population is negatively correlated with voting for Obama.
861.
by impendia 14y ago
"Benefit of doubt" contradicts the principle of peer review. No credible working research mathematician (I am one) could look at that paper for more than fifteen seconds and regard it with anything other than uproarious laughter.
862.
by impendia 14y ago
I agree with most of what you say (and thank you also for the link), but not "all is well". Quite possibly the importance of this law should not be overstated, and I agree with you and your children carrying on with your Coursera courses. B
863.
by impendia 14y ago
Keep in mind that the parties used to stand for something different too. For example Strom Thurmond, a far-right-wing senator from South Carolina, was a Democrat until 1964.
864.
by impendia 14y ago
With Marquez I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude years after I finished my undergraduate education. A quote on the back cover declared it to be second only to Genesis in profundity and importance, and I was curious. Certainly I did
865.
by impendia 14y ago
I do enjoy some literature. Huck Finn, 1984 and Animal Farm, Brave New World, Jane Eyre, Lord of the Rings come to mind. Didn't care for the Iliad, but I enjoyed Plato. But you mention enjoying words. Now that I think of it, I don't typical
866.
by impendia 14y ago
> On the other hand if you rule such works out, wouldn't you also get rid of many important and enjoyable works. Much of Borges, Eliot's The Waste Land, DFW's novels and essays, Pynchon, Homer are some of the ones that immediately came
867.
by impendia 14y ago
I seem to remember some post on HN about how 90% of interview candidates can't write FizzBuzz?
868.
by impendia 14y ago
You describe your job as easy, and that you've stopped learning new things already. For me, that would be a dealbreaker. I personally quit a job that was at least sort of along the lines you described, to go to graduate school. I'm now a ma
869.
by impendia 14y ago
First of all, take a weekend, go to some state park within easy driving distance of San Francisco, and spend the weekend hiking around the mountains by yourself. Have this question in the back of your mind, but don't deliberately dwell on i
870.
Whiteboard paint recommendations?
2 points by impendia 14y ago|2 comments

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