[HN Gopher] He dropped out to become a poet - now he's won a Fie...
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He dropped out to become a poet - now he's won a Fields Medal
(2022)
Author : hyperthesis
Score : 132 points
Date : 2023-08-05 10:31 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Interesting, his description of not being able to choose what he
| focuses on and struggling in school is typical of ADHD.
| shrx wrote:
| He = June Huh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Huh
| maliker wrote:
| G.H. Hardy was also famous for not working that hard. From
| https://math.stackexchange.com/a/845622
|
| "In fact for most of his life his day, at least during the
| cricket season, would consist of breakfast during which he read
| The Times studying the cricket scores with great interest. After
| breakfast he would work on his own mathematical researches from 9
| o'clock till 1 o'clock. Then, after a light lunch, he would walk
| down to the university cricket ground to watch a game. In the
| late afternoon he would walk slowly back to his rooms in College.
| There he took dinner, which he followed with a glass of wine.
| When cricket was not in season, it was the Australian cricket
| scores he would read in The Times and he would play real tennis
| in the afternoons."
| leipert wrote:
| 4h each day, consistently, every day, seems like it could be
| considered ,,hard-working", especially working on Maths.
| maksimur wrote:
| Wonder if his experience as a poet opened his mind to the kind of
| imagination you need in higher mathematics.
| goodbyesf wrote:
| He (June) dropped out to
|
| Become a poet. Now he's
|
| Won a Fields Medal.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _He dropped out to become a poet - now he's won a Fields Medal_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31985400 - July 2022 (136
| comments)
| majikaja wrote:
| I remember once reading someone on Wall Street Oasis saying that
| Nobel prizes and Fields medals are nothing special (as a judge of
| intelligence) as the lure of money found in business is not there
| to attract the brightest into competing.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Yet RenTech recruits these people
| https://www.reuters.com/article/simons-hedge/renaissance-hed...
| hgsgm wrote:
| The Wall Street guys work 90 hour weeks and many have to wear
| awful clothes in awful offices with awful people. The Fields
| medalists work 20 or less in their pajamas.
|
| Are you sure the Wall Street guys are better paid?
| pyduan wrote:
| You are quoting someone from a financial career interview forum
| who can't imagine why a bright person would want to pursue a
| lesser paid career in research.
| bjornasm wrote:
| As if you don't easily see the futileness of soending your life
| chasing money when you are very intelligent.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Please explain why financial modeling is more futile than
| abstract graph theory. Both are math problems.
|
| Guess who paid for the article you just read? James Simons, a
| "money chaser".
| julianeon wrote:
| It seems like it might be time for Korean science & math to have
| a higher profile; Huh grew up in South Korea and his father was a
| statistician there, and of course the really big news this year,
| LK99.
| [deleted]
| johnaspden wrote:
| Presumably he doesn't care. How's his poetry?
| juunpp wrote:
| The handwriting on those notes is legit.
| amelius wrote:
| Written without a single mistake.
|
| Kinda suspicious, if you ask me. These are probably not his
| notes, but more like a publication and he doesn't want to use
| modern tools.
| maksimur wrote:
| Not hard to write notes without mistakes if you write
| regularly. What surprises me is people typing mistakes so
| often.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| his blackboards also look like that.
| arturkane7 wrote:
| The title is less surprising if you consider that straight after
| dropping out to be a poet (in high school) he effectively started
| getting one to one tutoring from a field medalist for three years
| in his late teens to early 20s, to practically living with the
| medalist.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Is it? Give me the full attention of a Fields medalist for any
| number of years and it will not make me a Fields medalist.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Well it was a poet and just decided to take introduction
| algebraic structures with a fields metal winner?
|
| There's a lot of liberties taken by the pseudo biographical
| articles, especially when they're dealing with the gee whiz
| genius trope in American media which is really annoying.
|
| It's really just anti-intellectualisn cloaked to something
| else.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I think OP is merely suggesting that the tutelage of a Fields
| medalist had more to do with the subsequent Fields medal than
| did the poetry. I didn't read the comment as diminishing the
| accomplishments or suggesting anyone could do the same if
| they just had the right tutor. It was clarifying the title
| that misleadingly implies a causal relationship between
| poetry and math, or that he somehow stopped studying yet
| succeeded anyway.
| aidepast wrote:
| Perhaps unrelated, but I wonder who these mentors were in the
| case of people like da Vinci, Socrates, Archimedes, Newton et
| al. They must have had some adults who guided them toward what
| they're known for. It seems absurd to believe that they just
| happened to grow up like that. It's as if everybody today, once
| you skim the "Early Life" section, it turns out had something
| fantastic, like a mother who was a Fields medalist, or uncle
| who invented this or that. The more that I see, the more I'm of
| the opinion that "genius" is simply:
|
| 1. effort, usually from youth, that nobody knows about so it
| appears to be innate
|
| 2. the effort is motivated and guided by some mentor(s),
| usually people with serious qualifications, like your Fields
| medalist uncle deciding to take you under his wing, after you
| said "math is fun :D" one time at 7 years old when he told you
| his job was "to do math :)" upon you asking him as children
| like to do, and turn you into a Fields-winning adult
|
| This reminds me of those people who pretend they're a genius
| because they can guess the day of the week if you give them a
| date, when the reality is that anybody can learn to do that
| because it's just an algorithm[1] that you can calculate in
| your head and practice to the point that you come off as if you
| have a photographic memory or something.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule
| OneDonOne wrote:
| Yes, but then comes the question - who mentored.the mentor?
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| While upbringing ("nurture") is clearly a critical component
| to success in any specialized field, there is undeniably a
| "nature" component as well, and I doubt that the best nurture
| could overcome lack of natural talent anymore than natural
| talent could overcome lack of nurture. To be the best you
| need a lot of both.
|
| It's more obvious in athletics, where there is clearly
| natural talent, but the equalizer is the support network of
| parents funding practice, driving to games, getting into
| competitive leagues, etc. I don't see why the same wouldn't
| apply to intellectual talents as well, even if the
| differences in natural talent are less obvious than in
| athletics.
| lioeters wrote:
| As well as mentors, we should consider the environment in
| which genius arose, their cultural context and influences,
| the zeitgeist, intellectual atmosphere, schools, parents,
| friends, colleagues, the books they read.
|
| I think we overvalue the uniqueness of the individual in this
| hero worship of the lonely genius, as if a flower is
| independent of the earth from which it grows.
|
| But then again, it's true that there are exceptional stars,
| singular phenomena that cannot be explained by the sum of its
| parts. I suppose that leap, the surprising distance between
| what was given and what the individual made of it, is what we
| call genius, talent, luck or hard work.
| Nevermark wrote:
| I think there is a tremendous variety across all of us, in
| how we recognize and apply the abstractions we call
| "understanding the world".
|
| We can see common evidence of this in how every person we
| know differs in their general abilities across different
| problem areas.
|
| But we are so used to that we are probably under aware of
| how differently we may all think.
|
| Potential geniuses would be people whose internal
| abstractions are uncommon and happen to fit important
| under-solved problem areas.
|
| If their uncommon insights are paired with healthy brain
| biology, a drive to identify and solve interesting
| problems, and some luck, we get a genius.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoel-on-
| aristoc...
| twilight7k wrote:
| That makes sense because getting into top uni like SNU is hard
| enough as it is. I was wondering how a dropout was able to pull
| it off. Nautral talent plus hardwork and good mentoring was all
| in there.
| ak_111 wrote:
| It probably helps a lot to grow in an academic household,
| seems his dad was a stats professor and his mom a linguistic
| one, his informal math education growing up and work
| discipline must have been way above average. I bet he was a
| straight A math student.
| quacked wrote:
| > I was wondering how a dropout was able to pull it off.
| Nautral talent plus hardwork and good mentoring was all in
| there.
|
| "Formal education" is just industrialized mentoring and
| compelled hard work. Dropouts and "uneducated" people built
| the world. If you work hard and have good mentors, you can do
| anything, whether it's in a school or not.
|
| (While I am vehemently opposed to the modern method of
| education, I don't think that formal education in a classroom
| setting is inherently bad, nor do I think most people today
| have the social support, intellect, or temperament necessary
| to drop out and still be successful.)
| atlantic wrote:
| From the description, I don't think the term "tutoring" covers
| it. It was more in the nature of a master-disciple relation,
| such as is found in Japanese traditional arts. That was the
| transformational moment in his life.
| ramblerman wrote:
| It's still surprising, but I agree, worth mentioning.
|
| Although I don't think a field medalist would waste his time
| with an untalented youth. He obviously saw something.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >I don't think a field medalist would waste his time with an
| untalented youth.
|
| Ugh. Do you think a Fields medalist would "waste" his time
| cleaning his bedroom? Folding his clothes?
|
| 1. The world is much more menial than you think it is.
|
| 2. Fields medalists are, unsurprisingly, human beings, and
| keep doing human stuff like making new friends just for fun.
|
| 3. Not everyone is living under the weird delusion/obsession
| where all outcomes have to be maximally favorable for "life
| to be worth it". Not all companies have to be billion dollar
| companies. Not all students have to go and win Fields medals.
|
| 4. The _" untalented youth"_ is much more interesting than
| what you give them credit for.
| user_named wrote:
| He got paid
| arturkane7 wrote:
| I didn't meant it in a way to diminish how clever he is. Just
| the bit about dropping out is overstated relative to what
| came straight after.
| linhvn wrote:
| Yes, it was lucky that he was tutored my a Fields medalist.
| But he did the hard work to get himself tutored: sitting in
| an algebraic geometry class (that saw attendances dropping
| from 200 to 5 within a few weeks), reaching out to the
| professor, traveling with him for 2 years, etc. And then he
| still needed to do all the work himself for his PhD, and so
| forth.
| wwarner wrote:
| I took the point to be that the skill of making progress on
| open questions is very different from the skill of quickly
| mastering established facts.
| tzs wrote:
| It was at least 6 years after dropping out in high school that
| he met Hironaka. From Huh's Fields medal interview with the
| International Mathematical Union [1]:
|
| > Soon after finishing college, I had the good fortune to meet
| Professor Heisuke Hironaka
|
| [1]
| https://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Prizes/Fields/2022/H...
| messe wrote:
| The title immediately reminded of a David Hilbert quote. Upon
| hearing that one of his students had dropped out to become a
| poet, he is said to have remarked:
|
| "Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a
| mathematician."
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Quite sad to hear that remark. I'm a big fan of Hilbert but
| that kind of pettiness is sad to see from him. I guess we're
| all just human.
| hmmmcurious1 wrote:
| He's just emphasizing the amount of creativity you need in
| mathematics research.
| haswell wrote:
| It is possible to provide such emphasis without belittling
| former students in the process.
|
| I'm a bit cautious about this because it's presented as "he
| is said to have remarked...", but cutting people down -
| especially students - to make some other point is
| unnecessary and not ideal.
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| let's just please not forget that they lived in a
| different time and place... I'm sure in Hilbert's time
| there was nothing bad about what he said like there's
| now.
|
| not that I particularly like Hilbert, he gives me a bad
| vibe because:
|
| how do I forgive shitty professors who have refused to
| help me? how do I let go of the fact they are awful
| people from a different era? How do I refuse to undergo
| the rituals which teach things I whish to not learn
| (certain attitudes) while at the same time making it
| through those same rituals I reject?
|
| and it turns out the professor I speak of IS on D.
| Hilbert's lineage!
| bjornasm wrote:
| How do you know he is belittling a former student?
| hgsgm wrote:
| Because the quote says so
| arturkane7 wrote:
| You will then love Paul Erdos sending a colleague an earnest
| letter saying he was "praying for his soul" for publishing a
| paper in the Journal of _Applied_ Probability.
|
| This kind of militant snobbery for pure math is common with
| the greats and shouldn't be taken personally.
| em-bee wrote:
| millitant snobbery reminds me of a student colleague who
| had been studying math. she had small bells tied into her
| hair, and she told us that the bells were to remind her
| that there are other things in life besides math.
| messe wrote:
| > shouldn't be taken personally
|
| I think it also shouldn't always be taken so seriously. In
| my experience, mathematicians (both applied and pure) tend
| to have a sense of humour about this sort of thing, and I
| see no reason to doubt that that wouldn't have applied to
| at least some of the greats as well.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Why should shitting on other fields or their passions be
| taken less seriously just because it's common for
| mathematicians to do it?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The physicists where I work like to joke about how
| engineers can't do basic physics stuff and the engineers
| like to joke about how physicists struggle to convert
| design into reality.
|
| Neither of them genuinely dislikes the other's
| field/passion, they're actually very appreciative of each
| other's skills. It's just a very common kind of humor.
| arturkane7 wrote:
| lol these are meant to be ironic comments, seems you are
| taking them far too seriously. Look up Erdos's story to
| understand his irony.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I just think it's sad because a lot of people are put off
| by this kind of snobbery in mathematics.
|
| Joking or ironic or not it can still be harmful.
| tekla wrote:
| I find it harmful that you think that this is snobbery.
| bjornasm wrote:
| Yeah agree. The world becomes a bleak place if people are
| not allowed to joke around a bit, especially harmless
| jokes as those.
| tveita wrote:
| If it was said about e.g. accounting it could come off as
| snobbery. Everyone knows that being a poet requires
| imagination, so no one is going to see it as anything
| other than a light-hearted joke.
| hgsgm wrote:
| The point of the quote is that mathematics requires more
| imagination.
| mejutoco wrote:
| On the other side, if it was said about lawyers nobody
| would ever complain :)
| TheFreim wrote:
| It's common for people to talk about different fields
| this way, it's a form of lighthearted rivalry. Not worth
| getting worked up over it, unless you're an unfunny
| boring person.
| [deleted]
| distant_hat wrote:
| Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/435/ It isn't limited to
| greats either.
| bjornasm wrote:
| You can interpret it as pettiness or just a humorous remark
| said with a smile.
| gnatman wrote:
| It's absolutely a joke!
| gobdovan wrote:
| To me it sounds like a tongue in cheek remark because
| creativity is obviously needed in poetry and is strongly
| associated with poetry. Sounds like the type of thing a
| teacher says to get a laugh out of the students. You can give
| Hilbert more leeway without more context.
| neontomo wrote:
| Most interesting about this article for me was the parts about
| how he conducts his thinking, which is slowly and allowing space
| for distractions or re-reading books instead of finding new ones.
| It sounds contradictory to what would be productive in learning,
| but it seems to help him in processing concepts.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Why would careful study contradict learning?
| f_gg_tk_ll_r wrote:
| [dead]
| bell-cot wrote:
| Attn: Departmental Curriculum Committee
|
| Prior: URGENT
|
| Re: [Article Attached]
|
| For those who recall the Regents' recent decision to cut
| humanities yet again, there will be a special Departmental
| Curriculum Committee meeting at 4pm on Monday. Meeting Subject -
| developing and offering new courses for both seniors and graduate
| students in _Mathematics_. Starting this Fall term.
|
| - Sonata Wordwright, Departmental Assistant Dean of Humanities
| for Poetry
| tarr11 wrote:
| I found the writing of this piece to be very clear and
| accessible.
|
| Whenever i read something like this, I marvel at the author who
| can be both fluent in Mathematics and have an ability to convey
| very complex ideas to a lay reader.
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