[HN Gopher] Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan
___________________________________________________________________
Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan
Author : philiplu
Score : 742 points
Date : 2024-10-21 23:19 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| datavirtue wrote:
| Why aren't we working on drugs to make people smart?
| hereme888 wrote:
| We did and still are. You can only safely push hardware so
| much.
| NAHWheatCracker wrote:
| Lots of people are, they're called nootropics.
|
| Whether they are successful and whether they are mostly a bunch
| of snake oil is another question...
| babyent wrote:
| I feel way more productive since going sxe.
|
| I am naturally so tired around 9pm when I shut the lid of my
| laptop that I fall asleep within minutes of getting in bed.
|
| On a side note.. Somehow my dreams have been insane and I've
| low key enjoyed the vivid worlds I find myself in over the
| past few months.
|
| Wake up around 5 or 6, go for a stroll and then eat some
| breakfast.
|
| Then I can work taking only breaks for lunch and dinner.
| Sometimes a 30 min nap in the afternoon in the park.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| For those unfamiliar with the abbreviation sxe:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_edge
|
| > Straight edge (sometimes abbreviated as sXe or signified
| by XXX or simply X) is a subculture of hardcore punk whose
| adherents refrain from using alcohol, tobacco, and
| recreational drugs in reaction to the punk subculture's
| excesses. Some adherents refrain from engaging in
| promiscuous or casual sex, follow a vegetarian or vegan
| diet and do not consume caffeine or prescription drugs. The
| term "straight edge" was adopted from the 1981 song
| "Straight Edge" by the hardcore punk band Minor Threat.
| muixoozie wrote:
| > sxe
|
| Weird. First time I've ever seen that (abbreviation?) For
| straight-egde. Thought you were talking about some
| supplement at first.
| drilbo wrote:
| I thought the same and instantly googled, and immediately
| remembered I had seen it before. It's like a play off HxC
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I've always been pretty much straight-edge. Don't drink
| much alcohol, and recently went off caffeine.
|
| I'm naturally tired at around 2am. I barely dream, or can't
| remember my dreams. I struggle to wake up at 6:30 even
| after 7+ hours of sleep.
|
| I do like an afternoon nap, but Sunday's are almost the
| only opportunity. As a bad consolation prize, I
| involuntarily micro-sleep at my desk, working from home or
| in the office, a handful of times most days, generally at
| peak afternoon nap times (1:30pm - 3:30pm).
|
| I wouldn't say I'm productive, but I would say that the
| work I produce is generally of a high quality.
| RandomWorker wrote:
| Caffeine is the most used drug in academia.
| wyre wrote:
| Surely the most used because of its affordablity and easy
| access. Coffee, energy drinks, tea, caffiene pills, etc.
|
| I wonder what academia would look like if adderall, vyvanse,
| modafinil were just as accessible, or even less controlled
| substances that are considered to enhance mental performance
| like L-tyrosine, alpha-GPC, Lion's Mane mushroom, Bacopa, or
| Ginko.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Caffeine also has a track record of several centuries.
|
| We really, really know the long term effects.
| hskalin wrote:
| What are the long term effects? How harmful is caffeine
| addiction?
| astrange wrote:
| Alpha-GPC is just choline, so you can get it by eating
| eggs. Amino acids and mushrooms are also quite accessible.
|
| Modafinil is straight up better than caffeine though, which
| is a crappy and addictive stimulant.
| drilbo wrote:
| "just" choline is a little reductionist, it's much more
| bioavailable.
|
| I'm not sure where the distinction actually lies, but it
| is also considered a (generally recognized as safe) drug.
| paulpauper wrote:
| no, you mean Ritalin. caffeine is a joke compared to actual
| stimulants.
| elmomle wrote:
| I used to think like you do. But the real place where we could
| make tons of progress is in relationships. Many stories of
| great thinkers involve one or a few crucial
| mentoring/pedagogical relationships. Without those, a person
| could forever find themselves trying to fit their square peg
| into the round hole of what "normal" society around them seems
| to expect. I can easily see how my life could have ended up
| like that.
|
| As someone who benefited greatly from a few mentors in
| childhood and adolescence, my goal is to be able to give the
| same to at least a few other people in my lifetime.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Was just discussing various parenting stories with my
| colleagues over lunch and, like relationships, childhood
| environment and parental boundaries (or otherwise) would
| likely be the greatest influence to any individual.
|
| But then, if 'mentors' applies to parents, then I guess I'm
| saying the same thing.
|
| Having said that, my teenage son wastes a lot of his life
| playing online games with his friends, but having said that,
| I heard him say mid-game to a friend of his "Brazilian isn't
| a language you idiot!". So, I mean it's trivia, but he knows
| there's no language called Brazilian. He's a smart kid
| (that's not the only data point).
|
| (I had to look it up: Portugese is the official language of
| Brazil).
| alok-g wrote:
| >> As someone who benefited greatly from a few mentors in
| childhood and adolescence, my goal is to be able to give the
| same to at least a few other people in my lifetime.
|
| +1. Same for me.
|
| Relationships has been more important than what I could
| consider ideal or optimal (in terms of how many missed
| opportunities are there).
|
| Once I was reading a technical paper from a colleague and
| could not follow much. Spoke to him and he could explain the
| crux of it in two-three sentences. I was left wondering why
| that was not there in the paper itself. But that happens
| repeatedly. People are able to explain much better than the
| literature they produce*.
|
| This perhaps has a contribution as to why good relationships
| and mentors end up being so important. But then, this
| ultimately comes in the way of scalability.
|
| * Of course, it may possibly also be that in a verbal
| conversation when the author personally knows the reader,
| they can explain to that reader better. However, I think this
| effect is less important than people being able to write
| better.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I wonder what effects do you expect from that on a societal
| scale in the long term (at least 3,4 decades) ?
|
| For instance we banned meth and other drugs that have
| tremendous productivity effects at the expense of the
| individual and how we had to deal with them, so it's not a
| rhetoric question.
| kennedywm wrote:
| We didn't fully ban them. We just prescribe them to anyone a
| doctor decides has ADHD.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Not quite, but if one does not have ADHD or something
| similar, things like adderall have a very different effect
| than they do to someone who has ADHD.
|
| Your apparent disbelief in ADHD doesn't make it imaginary,
| by the way. Consider yourself lucky that you do not have
| it; I am unemployable without medication.
| furyofantares wrote:
| People without ADHD take adderall &etc for
| focus/performance enhancing reasons. Some get it from a
| friend, some are incorrectly diagnosed. I don't know if
| you disagree that this is the case, but I don't think it
| implies anything about ADHD.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Don't forget the military. Go pills.
| nick__m wrote:
| You will be surprised to learn that methamphetamine is not
| banned and that it is currently prescribed for refractary
| ADHD under the name desoxyn!
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I'm aware we never "ban" any specific substance, as we say
| the dose makes the poison. And any substance that has any
| effect is also a potential cure for the disease that has
| the opposite effect.
|
| I should have been clear I saw it in the "make people
| smart" light, as doping an already acceptable situation,
| instead of correcting something perceived as a pathology.
|
| Meth was widely available over the counter at some point,
| and we made it legally disappear outside of strict medical
| settings.
| astrange wrote:
| Anything in Schedule I is almost fully banned, though
| people will try hard enough to get around it that it
| doesn't matter.
| astrange wrote:
| IIRC nicotine is the most effective nootropic by far, the
| problem being that it's super addictive.
|
| But none of them work as well as sleep and exercise.
| abound wrote:
| And eating right! Gotta complete that trifecta, each one
| compliments the others.
| willy_k wrote:
| IIRC nicotine itself isn't super addictive when used solely
| in a less addictive form, as in gum or patch.
| drilbo wrote:
| Have you ever tried taking a vape away from a teenager?
|
| ...or me?
| willy_k wrote:
| A vape is definitely not a less addictive form, I can
| attest to that. But especially with the patch, and to a
| lesser extend with gum, it's not that addictive to (most)
| people who that never had a
| cigarette/vaping/dipping/pouching addiction. Gum is
| probably still more addictive than coffee but I would
| guess it's at least closer to that of coffee than
| inhaling it.
| drilbo wrote:
| In the past, when I've heard the 'less additive form', it
| was in contrast to nicotine from tobacco, where there are
| other chemicals and compounds at play. While it's true
| ROA can be a big part of habit formation, I'd argue it's
| a stretch to call it different _form_ when it 's the same
| chemical in either case.
|
| tbf tho, I am somewhat contradicting another comment I
| made about bioavailability on this very gp thread so
| suffice to say, I do understand your point.
| willy_k wrote:
| I mean they quite literally come in completely different
| forms of products, but I get your point. I thought
| nicotine vs tobacco was mostly important for health risk,
| with the exception of cigarettes which IIRC have all
| sorts of nasty stuff added or in trace amounts.
| astrange wrote:
| That's also my understanding, and nicotine has some other
| strange health benefits - for instance, it's a better
| schizophrenia treatment (for symptom relief) than the
| actual medications for it, which is why almost all
| schizophrenics smoke.
|
| On the other hand, I just looked at Twitter and saw two
| different people get ~$3000 payments from a class action
| lawsuit against Juul, which is by far the biggest payment
| I've ever heard of from a class action signup, so I
| suspect they're about to die.
| throwaway10oct wrote:
| I think modafinil is a wonderful drug, far more potent than
| caffeine or nicotine. It's also very easy to get with no long
| term ill effects. There is a whole subreddit dedicated to this.
|
| Wonder why more people aren't using it.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| > no long term ill effects
|
| That is not totally true for at least three reasons:
|
| 1. Modafinil can interact badly with some other stimulants.
| One must remain careful.
|
| 2. Modafinil by itself can cause SJS and similar serious
| problems in rare cases.
|
| 3. Chronic use of modafinil can easily produce anxiety, so
| much anxiety that it makes using modafinil impossible. This
| is even in a very low dose.
| pelorat wrote:
| > Wonder why more people aren't using it.
|
| Because it's classified as an amphetamine in large parts of
| the western world and would be illegal obtain without a
| prescription.
| munchler wrote:
| Careful what you wish for:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini...
| dmichulke wrote:
| @HN: Downvoting questions is stupid.
|
| You're perpetuating "be ashamed of not knowing" instead of
| encouraging "learn by asking questions".
|
| If you agree, consider upvoting downvoted questions.
| drilbo wrote:
| I think gene therapy type stuff seems more interesting at this
| point:
|
| https://www.psypost.org/new-intranasal-rna-therapy-shows-pro...
| mannyv wrote:
| It's called nicotine.
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| I bet if such an effective drug were created, that just like
| Ozempic, we'd end up in a situation where the rich buy it up
| and use it to increase their advantage thus only widening the
| wealth gap. Like some dystopian Monkey's paw effect.
| devvvvvvv wrote:
| Positive eugenics would result in more smart people with zero
| drugs or genetic engineering involved. And it requires zero
| oppression or violence. Just pay couples with high IQs to have
| babies.
| babyent wrote:
| That was a fun read.
|
| What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other
| subjects except math because he wasn't interested in them.
|
| I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other
| subjects.
|
| But what if those just aren't interesting to someone?
|
| I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of
| homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and
| memorization for the sake of getting an A.
|
| Meanwhile, hardly anyone actually remembers anything about those
| topics and even the best students mostly go on to achieve only
| above average things.
|
| My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while that
| is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and he
| practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn't pushing the
| boundaries of medical science. I feel terrible writing that
| because I'm certainly not as smart as him, but R is just so
| impressive and I'm glad he got his lucky break.
|
| People like R would be lost in the sea of averages because their
| genius would be kept shut by norms.
|
| Almost every extraordinary person I read about seems like they
| were 1 step away from being forgotten, and got some huge
| universal break that boosted them.
| nordsieck wrote:
| IMO, you're thinking about this backwards.
|
| It's _good_ that public school exposes children to many
| subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if
| they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone
| never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to
| specialize in a subject.
| brutal_true_101 wrote:
| Most colleges now inundate students with painful core classes
| that go on into senior year. It's getting ridiculous.
| Arainach wrote:
| College is not trade school. College exists not to generate
| people who are masters of Framework v3.0, but to generate
| people who can quickly learn to use whatever tool they're
| given and who can connect the dots to solve generic
| problems. Part of that is exposure to a broad range of
| ideas. Part of that is showing that you can learn about and
| deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited
| about.
| kiba wrote:
| I don't think college teaches people how to learn, and if
| they do it's only by accident. There's a body of
| knowledge on how to teach and how to self educate and it
| takes a long time for systems to incorporate these
| knowledge.
| esafak wrote:
| Isn't that what high school is for? What's the difference
| then?
| WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote:
| High school has been dumbed down and is mostly a waste of
| time.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Most of school is primarily baby sitting these days, if
| were being really real.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| That _is_ what high school is, for families where parents
| want their kids to learn to learn and are well-resourced
| enough to teach the kids themselves or pay someone to
| teach.
| hnfong wrote:
| > Part of that is showing that you can learn about and
| deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited
| about.
|
| Why is that useful besides for the employer trying to
| impose Framework v3.0 onto their subjects?
|
| To me at least, learning things one is not excited about
| is only useful to capitalist society that views human
| beings as replaceable resources.
| xenophonf wrote:
| I wasn't particularly excited to learn philosophy or
| economics, but that gave me the foundation to understand
| Marx and Engels. Learning "things you're not necessarily
| excited about" makes you well-rounded. That's a _good
| thing_.
|
| Let's use another example. Communicating with other
| people is a very important part of my job as a software
| engineer. I'd say that at this point in my career,
| writing good proposals, documentation, project charters,
| task orders, change requests, etc. is vital to my
| individual and collective success, so I'm glad I was
| taught lots of rhetoric and literature and writing and
| all that artsy stuff my younger self spent too much time
| disdaining.
|
| Or another example. I have written precisely zero lines
| of Lisp or ML for work, and I flunked the first computer
| science class I took that used Lisp (good old _Essentials
| of Programming Languages_). And yet I use the concepts I
| learned in those classes _all the time_. Heck, I was just
| talking about side effects the other day in the context
| of 21 CFR Part 11 computer system validation.
|
| My last metaphor. Brushing one's teeth or taking a shower
| isn't particularly exciting, but that kind of routine
| maintenance work is a vital part of your physical health.
| So it goes for mental exercise. Reading something
| challenging, learning the work's historical context, and
| writing a critical response well all helps keep you
| mentally healthy. That's good no matter what
| socioeconomic system you live in.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| This is true, but college general education requirements
| don't fulfill that role. They're classes of 250 people
| listening to a professor say "write this down because
| it'll be on the exam". Then the questions on the exam are
| what the professor said verbatim.
|
| My university didn't allow any classes above the most
| introductory ones to be considered as fulfilling the
| general education requirement. I signed up for a history
| class that would involve doing research and having weekly
| discussions with a small group. I was stoked. Then the
| professor made a note that it didn't fulfill the general
| education requirements. I had to drop it and switch to a
| huge-ass mindless lecture of hundreds of people. I
| would've liked to still take the more in-depth history
| class even if it didn't fit the gen ed requirement, but
| so many of those BS classes are required that my schedule
| was completely packed all 4 years with zero leeway.
| maxwelljoslyn wrote:
| I feel your pain. What a dumb system.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| You can get exceptions. My social science degree had math
| requirements, but the lowest math class I took was too
| high level to count for them. I had to fill out a sheet
| of paper and submit it to the dean, but other than an
| hour split between talking to my academic advisor,
| filling out a form, and talking to the dean it wasn't a
| problem.
|
| I still find it funny and informative that multivariable
| calculus, linear algebra, and high level math classes did
| not automatically fulfill the math requirement because no
| one ever tried to use them to satisfy it.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| It's probably because secondary school has become mostly
| worthless in the US, so college is taking its place.
| fn-mote wrote:
| Specific citation needed.
|
| At Big US Engineering School, many people are done with
| their prerequisites in a year.
|
| Unless you're talking about painful core classes like
| "compiler design" and "networking", which I would say is a
| different conversation.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Prerequisites are different from core stuff, like say you
| study computer science but hey take this English class as
| well for your W credits. I gamed my university on these,
| taking easy courses that I wouldn't have bothered with, I
| think it was one or two quarters of BS (dual acronym
| meaning) classes.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I used to shit on English class to anyone who would listen,
| but lately (at age 40) I realize (and grow frustrated at)
| how poorly most people around me communicate. But then
| again, I recall my English classes throughout highschool
| and college and very little time was spent on how to be
| clear, how to be precise, or how to revise. That definitely
| wasn't the parameter the curriculum was optimizing for.
| Sure, there was writing but the grade you got back was
| simply how much the instructor liked what you had to say.
| seiferteric wrote:
| Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be
| successful in these subjects as well. I have had similar
| thoughts recently as OP thinking about what I want for my
| young kids and what my experiences in school were. Being
| _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for
| being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. You can only get
| an A (or A+) in math for example, even if your a genius. But
| maybe you should be able to get an A++++ that makes up for
| D's or F's in English for example and still get accepted into
| top universities. We need a system that accommodates spiky
| people better.
| irjustin wrote:
| > Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to
| be successful in these subjects as well.
|
| Being specific, it's not school, it's what school grants
| you i.e. a paying job. The higher paying, thusly more
| coveted jobs, generally filter against good grades which
| then the requirement pushes downwards into schools because,
| at scale, it's a decent system; leveraging the schools to
| help decide who is good.
|
| > Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make
| up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't.
|
| I counter with, if you are "_really_" good, it shows
| because you truly are a genius and you get fast tracked on
| that subject, but I think your "_really_" is actually just
| "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in
| 100 million.
|
| To directly answer your point, for the "slightly smarter
| than everyone else" my middle school allowed kids to attend
| highschool in specific subjects and then highschool into
| the nearby community college and considered "harder/more
| prestigious" than the AP programs - admittedly only in math
| for this latter part. The school was in a more affluent
| neighborhood so I recognize the privilege.
| WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote:
| > but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_"
| and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100
| million.
|
| I don't quite understand your point. Pretty good still
| puts you far ahead of the average. I could easily handle
| second year college maths and computer science while in
| high school. And I couldn't hold a candle to Ramanujan.
|
| I still needed to do well in my other courses in order to
| be able to get into my chosen college.
| elijaht wrote:
| I think _that 's_ the point - "pretty good" isn't good
| enough for a top school to want to admit you. Second year
| college/CS is pretty good but I went to a great high
| school where there were 50+ kids at that level. That's
| not enough to stand out in a meaningful way.
|
| Whereas if someone was Ramanujan-level, their raw talent
| would be so apparent they wouldn't have this issue and
| _would_ clearly stand out.
| WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote:
| > Second year college/CS is pretty good but I went to a
| great high school where there were 50+ kids at that
| level. That's not enough to stand out in a meaningful
| way.
|
| It is not enough to stand out _in the current system_.
|
| The parent was saying selecting the 50 kids who can
| handle it is a much better approach than just taking the
| highest overall grades.
|
| The average A's across the board high school student
| can't handle second year college maths. Yet they will be
| placed ahead of the observably better at math kids.
|
| Imagine if jobs worked like this - "Yes, we know you are
| a great developer but you don't really understand
| economics. Sorry".
|
| Being well-rounded and having exposure to a bunch of
| topics is valuable to an extent. However, in my
| experience most of the people making a real difference in
| the workplace and academia are not particularly well
| rounded.
|
| Thankfully in tech there are alternative pathways.
| However, for many professions there aren't and these high
| performers are simply excluded to societies detriment.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > Imagine if jobs worked like this - "Yes, we know you
| are a great developer but you don't really understand
| economics. Sorry".
|
| This is exactly the route to exploitation by MBA
| managers.
|
| Great developer, loyal, doesn't understand the need to
| change companies to get paid a competitive salary.
| Perfect hire.
|
| The person who doesn't understand economics pays the
| price themselves.
| kiba wrote:
| _Being well-rounded and having exposure to a bunch of
| topics is valuable to an extent. However, in my
| experience most of the people making a real difference in
| the workplace and academia are not particularly well
| rounded._
|
| You can only progress so much in a field of expertise
| before hitting diminishing return.
|
| At some point it makes sense to broaden your knowledge
| and skillset.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >You can only progress so much in a field of expertise
| before hitting diminishing return.
|
| I suppose how long you can progress for and how far you
| can progress depends somewhat on the breadth and depth of
| the field of expertise.
|
| Many fields of expertise are so broad and deep that they
| have their own sub-fields just to make them manageable.
|
| So you would probably be in a sub-field and then broaden
| your knowledge and skill-set in a related sub-field of
| the overall field that you are well suited to.
|
| I'm betting it's likely you can see how your own
| particular field, as you are on HN, replicates this
| pattern.
| elijaht wrote:
| > It is not enough to stand out in the current system.
|
| What I'm saying is in some hypothetical system which
| places a great emphasis on specialization, people who are
| a few years ahead of curriculum are a dime a dozen and
| will not stand out. There were 50 kids in my high school,
| so how many is that nationwide?
|
| Particularly in math, it is straightforward for an
| exceptional talent to stand out. Competitive math is a
| clear pathway/credential. If someone is not able to
| achieve meaningful results then it's probably just the
| case that they aren't as talented as they believe
|
| > Imagine if jobs worked like this - "Yes, we know you
| are a great developer but you don't really understand
| economics. Sorry".
|
| There are plenty of software devs who are not getting
| hired to the potential of their raw development skills
| because they cannot communicate or collaborate
| productively. There are also plenty of software devs who
| are not getting hired to the potential of their raw
| development skills because they don't have as much domain
| knowledge as other devs.
| WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote:
| > people who are a few years ahead of curriculum are a
| dime a dozen and will not stand out.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean.
|
| High school has a much lower, but broader, bar.
|
| The number who can handle second year college math are a
| small fraction of those who can get straight A's at high
| school.
|
| > There are plenty of software devs who are not getting
| hired to the potential of their raw development skills
| because they cannot communicate or collaborate
| productively.
|
| These are behavioural issues and not knowledge issues. We
| do not address these kinds of issues at high school at
| all.
|
| Getting an A in English doesn't prepare you in any way to
| be a team player.
|
| In my ~15 year career the only people I've seen not hired
| because of a knowledge gap in this space have been non-
| native speakers.
| seiferteric wrote:
| Maybe, but TFA says at least in Ramanujan's case:
|
| But he ignored all subjects besides math and lost his
| scholarship within a year. He later enrolled in another
| university, this time in Madras (now Chennai), the
| provincial capital some 250 kilometers north. Again he
| flunked out.
|
| Maybe it would be different now?
| hgomersall wrote:
| If you get into the IMO team you'll be accepted anywhere
| good for maths. Probably a high position in the local
| competition would be enough. (YMMV as my understanding is
| coloured by a little knowledge of the system in the UK)
| jyunwai wrote:
| The admissions process to universities in the province of
| Ontario in Canada has a direct solution for this, which
| applies to well-known universities in the global technology
| industry, such as the University of Toronto and the
| University of Waterloo.
|
| Most of these universities look at an applicant's grades
| for just six courses. After looking at the courses required
| for certain programs (such as calculus and physics for
| certain programs), the remainder of the six courses
| comprise the student's top grades for any courses at the
| Grade 12 (final year) level.
|
| So, a high school student aiming for a top engineering or
| mathematics program will not be hamstrung by a poor grade
| in Grade 12 English, nor will a student aiming for a top
| international relations program be hamstrung by a poor
| grade in Calculus. At the same time, the student going into
| a STEM program will have an exposure to Shakespeare, which
| can provide inspiration and a rich set of works to explore
| later in life. The student going into international
| relations may later be inspired some years later to study
| mathematics for its beauty as a hobby, some years later.
|
| I remember the feeling that I was wasting time with many of
| my courses in those years, despite having good teachers for
| many of them--I thought my time spent on mandatory
| humanities courses like music took time away from more
| practical subjects, and I wish I took a programming course
| (though I did love my English classes). Perhaps this
| remains true for many students, but I personally took an
| interest in music performance as a hobby years later in
| life, and the years-old lessons in music theory came back
| to me. My English classes also introduced me to literature,
| which has remained a very important part of my life that
| has guided me through highly consequential life decisions
| for the better. It is unlikely that I would have taken an
| interest in literary works without my exposure to English
| in school.
| chongli wrote:
| To add to this I feel the need to point out that the
| writing skill demonstrated by the average mid-length
| Hacker News comment is above the level you'd need to pass
| grade 12 English in Ontario. It's an extremely low bar!
|
| Of course, if English is not your first language then
| you're not required to take this course. You have an
| alternate path which may be a lot more work for an
| English-language-learner but it doesn't demand the
| critical reading and writing skills you would need for
| grade 12 English.
| ykonstant wrote:
| I don't know how things work across the ocean, but here
| in Greece essay grading is a veritable mystery. The
| highest grade I ever got in a school essay was 16/20 and
| I had thought that was my masterpiece. Feedback always
| seemed cryptic (your essay contains platitudes, you are
| not developing your point enough etc.) and when I tried
| asking for specifics I got shrugs and you-still-
| don't-get-it groans. There are people who get 20/20 on
| essays consistently, so there must be some method to the
| grading madness; but I could not crack that method in my
| school years :(
| chongli wrote:
| The usual method to scoring top grades on an essay/paper
| is to flatter the professor. Not with literal platitudes
| but with a paper you think they'll agree with,
| incorporating arguments similar to the ones they made in
| class, etc.
|
| However, what I found is that even if the professor
| disagrees with your paper you'll usually get an 80% if
| it's well-written, well-researched, and well-argued. To
| get above that on something they disagree with requires
| both a highly open-minded professor and an argument they
| can't find fault with.
| melagonster wrote:
| I like the first reply immediately try to scoff you :)
| Maybe oop is right, but the real problem is people always
| try to do this.
| ecshafer wrote:
| 6 courses in your senior year doesn't seem like a great
| solution. If you figure you take Math, Science, History,
| English in your senior year, Then take 2 electives, that
| is basically a full schedule already. Short of replacing
| one of the poor grades with a freebie like Gym, I am not
| seeing where that solves the issue. This might be a
| difference in US and Canadian education, so maybe 6
| courses means something different.
| jyunwai wrote:
| A mathematics-focused student in Ontario could take
| Calculus & Vectors, Advanced Functions [1], Computer
| Science, and Physics--the first two courses should be
| straightforward for this student.
|
| Though Computer Science and Physics are distinctly
| different from the mathematics courses, these are still
| directly useful for a mathematics student to learn--the
| problem-solving skills should also carry over. Key
| mathematical discoveries have been inspired by problems
| in computer science and physics, and many rigorous
| university-level mathematics books still draw from
| problems in these fields to motivate certain problems. At
| the least, they are less laboratory-heavy than Biology
| and Chemistry (the student could still attempt these
| subjects, though, and choose to omit the grades for
| university admissions).
|
| That leaves a couple of other classes--or just one if
| English is required, as noted by another commenter. My
| school offered subjects like Grade 12 Drama, Visual Arts,
| and Music, where much of the grading was effort-based. In
| my school, most students in my classes saw these courses
| as a break from other intensive courses, with grades not
| being as much of a concern. This would allow the student
| to avoid using a grade for History, Economics, French (or
| another foreign language), or another subject.
|
| The English requirement would then be a difficult
| challenge for the mathematics-focused student. I wish I
| could speak more about what it was like for most of my
| classmates who went on to study engineering, as many of
| them took the standard English course (I took a more
| demanding version of the course, due to personal
| interest). My classmates at the time did not seem to have
| an issue with university admissions to competitive
| programs despite not enjoying the subject at the time,
| but the other commenter makes a good point that minimum
| grades for admission standards have increased greatly
| since then.
|
| --
|
| [1] As an aside: a past classmate--who was brilliant at
| mathematics and also great with people--later poked fun
| some years later about the Ontario government's naming
| for math courses. He said, "there's Grade 11 Functions...
| and then in Grade 12, there's Advanced (!) Functions."
| The last I heard, he went on to work as an investment
| banker at a top hedge fund by profitability in the United
| States.
| ckcheng wrote:
| > then in Grade 12, there's Advanced (!) Functions."
|
| Then in university, there's Elementary Functional
| Analysis!
| dagw wrote:
| The first math course as math major in university
| involved proving that a+b=b+a and that a+(b+c)=(a+b)+c.
| It's quite fun to go from 'advanced' calculus during the
| final classes of high school, to "OK, let's consider the
| expression 1+1=2. What does it actually mean and why is
| it true?"
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The first math course as math major in university
| involved proving that a+b=b+a and that a+(b+c)=(a+b)+c.
|
| Really? What were the axioms?
| dagw wrote:
| Basically the Peano axioms
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| How did that proof work for rational numbers?
| dagw wrote:
| It's been 20+ years, and I don't remember the exact steps
| the course went thought. But basically we started with
| defining N using the Peano axioms (although I don't
| recall the name 'Peano' being mentioned) and proving some
| basic rules of addition and equality. Then we defined
| subtraction, multiplication and inverse elements, and
| constructed Z and Q. From there you get to algebraic
| groups, and from there you can hand wave a lot of
| details.
|
| As I said it was literally one of the first math courses
| we did, so it wasn't super rigorous with all the
| technical and logical details.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Interesting. So it seems that from reading this, Canada,
| or at least Ontario, has a lot more electives at grade 12
| than the US. So this might be more like the UK with their
| A-levels. In the US a highly motivated student might take
| say 4-5 AP courses, which would essentially count as
| their freshman year at university. But they would be
| unlikely (short of going to a few dedicate highschools)
| of having more than maybe 2 math courses in a single
| year.
| Supermancho wrote:
| You can get tested into qualification, by most colleges.
| Colleges (which includes Universities, State schools,
| etc) aren't robotic. This is part of the responsibility
| of the administration. You may get delayed a semester or
| a year, with a little community college gatekeeping.
| Dedicated students can always get into a University.
| 3vidence wrote:
| Note here, in the current years, grades / competition has
| exploded so for the more competitive programs it is
| nearly impossible to get in without high 90s in all the
| required courses (English is required for all programs).
|
| So responding to OP, you indeed must be an expert in all
| subjects to have a chance to study in your field of
| expertise.
| computerdl wrote:
| Although I agree with the sentiment, the Ontario
| university system doesn't actually work that way. For
| example for Software Engineering at Waterloo, the
| admission average is calculated using the five required
| courses plus whatever your highest course is excluding
| the former[0].
|
| In practice, I believe every single Ontario university
| program lists English one of the required courses so it
| will always be included in your top six average.
|
| [0]: https://uwaterloo.ca/undergraduate-
| admissions/admissions/adm...
| boringg wrote:
| And it should always be included as one of the important
| courses in Canada. If you can't communicate your thoughts
| clearly then your thoughts never really translate into
| the real world.
| spollo wrote:
| From what I remember, the later years of English class
| (in Ontario) are more focused on literary criticism than
| effective communication. This was a frustration for me
| personally, and my lowest mark in High School. The high
| 80 dragged my average down enough that I didn't make the
| cut for Waterloo.
| jjmarr wrote:
| In 2024 you are not getting into Waterloo CS with
| anything less than a 99% in your top6. And that's the
| entry level. If you really want to get in, you have to
| grind math competitions, clubs, etc.
|
| I go to a mid-tier university (Toronto Metropolitan
| University) and the admissions average for CS was 97%
| last year.
|
| The admissions process for universities in Ontario is a
| joke at this point. Imagine if students going to Harvard
| instead of SUNY Plattsburgh differed by 2 percentage
| points in their high school averages.
|
| This means you must be absolutely perfect to have a shot
| of getting into a good school. In reality, teachers
| overlook mistakes and just give you the marks needed to
| get into top school if they think you deserve it. But
| because everyone does that, you also need to farm
| extracurriculars.
|
| Maybe I'll write a blog post about this since it sounds
| like people are interested.
| alephnerd wrote:
| This is the same reason why STEM admission became so
| competitive in UCs in California.
|
| UCs historically admitted using a mix of class rank, GPA,
| and test scores, but the number of seats at UCs didn't
| really increase in the past decade+ despite a small baby
| boom in the 2000s, and the growing prominence of STEM in
| the 2010s, so the average GPAs and SAT scores for UC
| admissions skyrocketed.
|
| Plenty of Californians have anecdotes of getting rejected
| from mid-tier UCs but getting into MIT or Stanford. It's
| had a downstream impact out-of-state as well, as plenty
| of Californians now attend out-of-state STEM programs for
| that reason (played a major role in upleveling UT
| Austin/UW/UIUC/GT/UW Madison's reputations among STEM-
| targeting HSers ime) and make STEM admissions harder in
| out-of-state colleges as well.
|
| That said, education quality for STEM majors is
| consistent across all UCs so the UC you go to doesn't
| matter as much academic quality wise.
| jjmarr wrote:
| I'm convinced good students don't need good universities
| as much as good universities need good students. I get
| the same internships and job opportunities as someone
| that went to UofT and I'm studying much of the same
| curriculum.
|
| A degree from a good university signifies a smart and
| dedicated student primarily because the school selects
| the best students for graduation. That occurs during
| acceptance and by making the program difficult, causing
| bad students to leave.
|
| The higher level of competitiveness is hurting the best
| universities during that acceptance phase. Ontario
| universities are no longer able to differentiate between
| the best and average. Waterloo is an exception because it
| has introduced math competitions across the province as a
| way to identify "A+++" students, but only Waterloo
| benefits from that.
|
| I'm noticing that many Ontario schools are now ignoring
| the acceptance phase and focusing on the weed-out phase.
| UofT accepts students into a common math/CS program, then
| only accepts the best students into CS for second year
| onwards. Queen's University has a common first year for
| all engineering majors.
|
| Even so, because the acceptance phase no longer
| differentiates, a lot of good students that would beat
| the second phase are caught in the first filter.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > I'm convinced good students don't need good
| universities as much as good universities need good
| students. I get the same internships and job
| opportunities as someone that went to UofT and I'm
| studying much of the same curriculum.
|
| In Engineering+Accounting+Actuary+Nursing I agree.
|
| > The higher level of competitiveness is hurting the best
| universities during that acceptance phase. Ontario
| universities are no longer able to differentiate between
| the best and average.
|
| Same thing in California, and that's largely because
| faculty hiring and infrastructure just didn't keep pace
| with the amount of students declaring
| Engineering+Accounting+Actuary+Nursing majors
| (Accounting+Actuary+Nursing face the same problems as
| STEM fields), which meant admissions need to be much more
| competitive because you can only teach so many students.
|
| I assume it's a similar story in Ontario due to decades
| of austerity in the province.
|
| > Even so, because the acceptance phase no longer
| differentiates, a lot of good students that would beat
| the second phase are caught in the first filter.
|
| Yep. Because infrastructure didn't scale.
|
| > Waterloo is an exception because it has introduced math
| competitions across the province as a way to identify
| "A+++" students, but only Waterloo benefits from that
|
| Yep, the Euclid is basically a soft requirement now for
| Waterloo CS admissions.
|
| Honestly, Ontario should just ditch "autonomous"
| universities and merge them under a single "University of
| Ontario" system and simplifying cross-system course
| transfers.
|
| Ontario should also force Colleges to stop giving
| Bachelors degrees and convert them either into Community
| Colleges to transfer to a University or convert larger
| Colleges into Universities.
|
| This is what Quebec does, and most state systems in the
| US (California, Texas, New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin,
| Massachusetts, etc).
|
| There is no reason for UWaterloo or Wilfrid Laurier to be
| two different universities despite being a couple blocks
| away from each other.
|
| Same for UT, UT Scarborough, York, TMU/Ryerson, etc all
| in GTA
| jyunwai wrote:
| To add on, I've worked with a lot of current and past
| Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) students at an
| aerospace industry non-profit. I do not see a difference
| with their quality of work and dedication between them
| and University of Toronto (UofT) students. Several of
| these students went on to land engineering and research
| internships at the Canadian Space Agency or work at a
| well-known aerospace company.
|
| The main advantage that UofT has for its undergraduates
| is related to funding. UofT's engineering design teams
| tend to be better-funded than TMU's, though TMU's
| engineering design teams still perform very well--proudly
| outperforming UofT's teams in certain years despite the
| funding gaps. In addition, some TMU students I've spoken
| with mentioned that UofT has more research opportunities.
| The name of the university also has a positive impact on
| admissions for students applying to graduate school.
| These advantages are not a reflection of the students who
| attend, but rather UofT's ability to raise funds.
|
| There is also a disadvantage I've seen at UofT. The TMU
| engineering students I've known have mentioned getting
| extensions approved easily for assignments and homework,
| to pursue professional opportunities such as hackathons
| and conferences. That is generally unheard of, from my
| experience in a STEM program at UofT. Policies are
| strictly outlined (with some leniency in many courses,
| such as dropping the lowest assignment mark), and I
| generally have not seen professors grant exceptions to
| these.
|
| But the main difference I've seen between TMU people and
| UofT people is university pride. I've met several people
| who were proud to go to TMU and succeed, whereas I
| haven't seen that at UofT (with the exception of UofT's
| engineering department). I'm satisfied with the
| opportunities I've gotten due to attending UofT--
| especially as I was involved with its on-campus work
| program and an engineering design team there--but I
| haven't met many UofT people fiercely proud of their
| school, in contrast to the TMU people I've met.
|
| In any case, I am happy to work with people from either
| school. Work experience and personality has mattered more
| to me than the name of the university that a person went
| to, and both TMU and UofT offer great opportunities for
| students to gain relevant experience--though these are up
| to the students to pursue, outside of their required
| classes.
| theLiminator wrote:
| Imo school grades should be disregarded entirely. We
| should bring back standardized testing, but make the
| ceiling much higher. Most people should score fairly low
| on it. This way, you can really see how good people are.
| At this point, people just get weeded out in university.
|
| This would also help the case of people like Ramanujan,
| he might score perfectly on the math portion of the
| standardized tests, and despite poor scores on everything
| else, he'd be distinguished.
| triyambakam wrote:
| He might also fail the standardized test entirely.
| theLiminator wrote:
| Perhaps, though imo standardized testing is the lesser of
| two evils.
|
| There's major inequity with the lack of standardized
| testing.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Are there not standardized exams in Ontario high school?
| When I grew up in Alberta standardized exams took up half
| your grade and those could not be fudged by your teacher.
|
| The exams were made by a small panel of teachers and
| nobody else knew the exam contents until the day of the
| exam. Everyone across the province takes the exam on the
| same day and time. Exams were proctored by people
| external to the school. Exams are again marked by a panel
| of teachers outside of your school.
|
| Cheating is nearly impossible outside of someone leaking
| the exam early.
| jojobas wrote:
| So in grade 5 you maths is A++++ (like college entry
| level), you're excused from English, Civics and what not,
| and when by the time of graduation you've fizzled out
| (which most prodigies do) you're just an unemployable nerd.
|
| School education standards are the barest minimum and
| anyone of IQ > 85 can make them.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| Personally I can't say I learned anything professionally
| useful in english or civics. An actually decent math
| class in just one of my years of k-12 would have been
| much more useful.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's weird to say that about English when good
| communication is essential for success in any engineering
| field. Even if all English does is force you to read
| more, it's probably a win in this regard.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > It's weird to say that about English when good
| communication is essential for success in any engineering
| field
|
| Some of what's taught in English classes is about clear
| communication, and some of it isn't.
|
| I think learning the 5 paragraph essay structure was very
| useful. But that's maybe 3 months worth of learning. The
| rest was English major stuff. Which is fine, but please
| don't pretend that it has a lot to do with "good
| communication".
|
| > Even if all English does is force you to read more,
| it's probably a win in this regard.
|
| It's not enough to say people had to read for English
| classes. You have to compare it to the counterfactual. In
| that regard, I don't think it stood up well.
|
| 1. I was already reading a lot. I just read different
| things.
|
| 2. I came to hate pretty much everything I read in class.
| It's only decades later that I've been able to appreciate
| some of the classics that we read.
|
| On this point, I think English class was a net harm, at
| least for me. Of course, everyone has different
| circumstances; I'm sure there are people for whom a
| similar program as what I went through would have been a
| benefit.
| tallanvor wrote:
| This is a very immature take.
|
| Of course you can BELIEVE that English classes didn't
| help you learn how to read and write more effectively or
| how to better understand what was left unsaid or
| unwritten, but believing something doesn't make it so.
|
| And yes, as a student reading the classics often sucks.
| After all, you're not reading them for pleasure - you're
| reading them to learn how to identify and discuss their
| themes. But more than that, you see how themes are
| repeated throughout history, and how the author's
| experiences changed how they illustrated those themes.
| English classes taught you plenty of history - not so
| much in rote facts, but rather by illustrating parts of
| the cultural zeitgeist of different eras and how authors
| reinforced, protested, or recorded what was happening at
| the time.
|
| I doubt many children appreciate education while they're
| learning, but adults certainly can be thankful that they
| weren't left in the dark.
| scotty79 wrote:
| It's very impolite to label lived experience of another
| educated and probably somewhat accomplished adult as
| immature.
|
| At 45 years old I can confidently say that anything I've
| "learned" on my native language classes through 12 years
| of having them was totally useless garbage and I'm using
| none of it in my writing, reading and culturural
| appreciation or understanding of the world. Everything I
| use was self-acquired in the time I had that was not
| spent in native language classes. Ideas of education are
| great, but the implementation is terrible to the point of
| being useless.
|
| On the other hand math, physics and chemistry I learned
| at school has been immensely practically and culturally
| useful and I wouldn't know a fraction of it if I wasn't
| taught it in school.
| ben_w wrote:
| 40, and I concur.
|
| Even if the goal is a cultural appreciation,
| Shakespeare's plays will tell you as much about England
| in 1585-1613 as Terry Gilliam's filmography does about
| the Anglosphere in 1971-present.
|
| It's more than zero, but it's also missing the
| overwhelming majority of the context and the world in
| which it exists.
|
| Modern readings treat Shakespeare with excessive
| reverence: not just "a playwright" but " _The_ Bard ".
|
| Those plays were made to be performed with very short
| rehearsal time before performing, outside, with no lights
| (at most fire, but it was wood and thatched and burned
| down from a theatrical cannon), in a crowded venue where
| audiences would be expected to jeer and cheer, whereas
| today it's a finely rehearsed performance by people who
| take it seriously performed for an audience who consider
| it high culture.
|
| Monty Python's Gumbies aren't well understood by new
| viewer today, as modern news treats "the man on the
| street" somewhat differently than in the 70s. How wrong
| do modern viewers comprehend Shakespeare's characters,
| considering that "The Taming of the Shrew" is classified
| as a comedy?
|
| That said, I was also busy teaching myself a lot of maths
| and science ahead of the classes; what I learned from
| school but would not have taught myself was the basics of
| German and French (though only the former stuck with me),
| the absolute basics of music notation, some metalworking
| and woodworking, and PE.
|
| Oh, and the practical experiences in the chemistry lab,
| though I'd have still done the theory myself without
| that.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > Shakespeare's plays will tell you as much about England
| in 1585-1613 as Terry Gilliam's filmography does about
| the Anglosphere in 1971-present.
|
| Why, given the vast ocean of possible knowledge, would
| you assume I or most people would have any interest or
| benefit in that? Over something like geometric algebra,
| soldering or solving quadratic equations?
|
| Human creations can be roughly divided in two categories,
| tools and content. Teaching content is pointless. Its
| selection is arbitrary and its value is roughly same and
| miniscule. Millions will choose Frotnite streamer over
| Shakespeare any day of the week. Math, physics,
| chemistry, foreign language are tools. Tools that the
| knowledge of can help you create whatever you desire,
| both content and whats more important and rare new tools.
| Native language classes, history, geography, even biology
| are very content heavy and very poor on tools. Thus they
| are mostly useless.
| ben_w wrote:
| I was agreeing with you about these points, sorry if that
| didn't come across, I was rather tired while writing
| that.
|
| I was also saying that even though the lens of culture,
| the generally mandatory Shakespeare is overrated.
| fizx wrote:
| When you're a scientist, you'd assume the calculus is the
| most useful thing you learn in high school, but actually
| its the 10 page essay on deadline for grant writing.
| dagw wrote:
| _I learned anything professionally useful in English_
|
| Even as someone who went full 'STEM' for both my
| education and career, English is probably among the most
| professionally useful courses I did in high school. A
| surprisingly large part of my job involves reading
| things, understanding them, and then writing a clear and
| reasoned response to them, all skills I first learned and
| really got to practice in English class.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Reading and writing is a huge part of software
| development. But I didn't learn these skills at school.
| If anything, school soured them for me, by making me read
| things I didn't want to read and writing things I didn't
| want to write. School should let you read what you want.
| Today that you read it could be checked with AI prepared
| quiz. And writing should be mostly focused on
| communication not essays. Very small fraction of people
| ends up getting significant utility writing their
| ramblings into the void.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > making me read things I didn't want to read and writing
| things I didn't want to write
|
| How to do things you don't want to do is a fundamental
| requirement for adulthood, and probably the most
| important skill anyone learns in school
| scotty79 wrote:
| I absolutely disagree. Adulthood is freedom. It's when
| you decide what you choose to do. Sometimes things feel
| like you have to do them but that's just remnants of the
| conditioning you were moulded by as a child. When you are
| pressed to the wall you are eventually forced to
| understand that you don't really have to do them, you
| just choose to, because however hard they may be it's
| easier for you than the available alternative. You don't
| have that level of agency as a child when you are
| constantly exposed to indoctrination from everybody more
| powerful than you (which at this stage is pretty much
| everybody).
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > Adulthood is freedom.
|
| Freedom? That has not been my experience of adulthood. To
| me adulthood is about making responsible choices based on
| their consequences for you and the people around you ...
| which means that the majority of my time is spent doing
| things that other people need rather than because I want
| to do them
| bluecalm wrote:
| That may be your experience. In such case I feel for you.
| For me doing things I don't want to do take less than an
| hour a day for my whole adult life. During school it was
| more like 11 (including going there, homework, other
| related chores). I hate school system with passion and I
| feel it was the worst thing that happened to me. I would
| be better off wandering the streets and getting access to
| a library.
| meiraleal wrote:
| > but success in school requires you to be successful in
| these subjects as well.
|
| It requires a very small success on a very basic level. It
| is not good to be a super math genius and know nothing
| about geography and history.
| panta wrote:
| The school should form decent individuals before than
| useful workers, and for that it's necessary to have a
| passing level of culture. For example, everyone should have
| a basic grasp of ethics (and know a bit of history), even
| those of us working in technology or science. Geniuses like
| Ramanunjan or John von Neumann are such a rare occurrence
| that the school system can not and should not optimize for
| them (and my very personal view is also that we'll have
| even less geniuses in the future, as our distraction-based
| society is not conducive anymore to cognitive development).
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Something about this sniffs as elitist to me. A person
| who's intelligent is curious and a person who's curious
| should be curious about all things, not just some limited
| set.
|
| Now, that's not to say the only issue is someone's
| curiosity. Traditional teaching methods make it very hard
| to be interested in some topics (history and language comes
| to mind), but barring that, I'm not sure I accept "it's not
| interesting" as a reason not to explore a subject.
| ben_w wrote:
| The only intelligence on earth capable of being equally
| curious about all things, of not needing to discriminate
| and focus only on preferred subjects, is the artificial
| kind of intelligence.
|
| The rest of us don't live long enough compared to our
| reading speed.
| atoav wrote:
| A few points on this:
|
| - How and _when_ would you know a subject doesn 't click?
| In my case German (my first language) and English sucked
| for roughly 8 years. I ended school with A in both and was
| the only student in my school without a single mistake in
| my exam.
|
| - School gives you good grades if you managed to learn the
| topics at hand. Being able to learn what is needed or what
| you are bad at -- not what you want and are good at is a
| skill in itself that can be important in life. I'd argue
| unless you are an exceptional genius (unlike 99,999% of
| pupils) you gain more from pulling through than you would
| if you called yourself a genius and focused on a single
| topic. Schools goal is to educate the majority
|
| - pupils (and often also their parents) are utterly unable
| to judge which bits of school will be essential to their
| later life. I had many collegues who utterly hated every
| second of a multitude of subjects, only to years later tell
| me how glad they are now to have had been subjected to it
| (which brings me back to my first point)
|
| We could (and should!) argue on how school works as a
| system of grades, teachers and pupils -- ideally teachers
| would motivate students to become curious about and
| proficient in subjects without the motivation of good or
| the threat of bad grades. But if my experience as an
| educator at the university levels (without grades in mh
| case) shows one thing it is that those first semester
| students who are really able to judge what will be useful
| to them later on are not many. Many of them are more like
| the dog in the meme: "Only stick, no take" -- they want to
| be able to do the cool thing without knowing what is needed
| to do the cool thing.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I mean, just as a counter-note: I utterly hated every
| second of a multitude of subjects, and indeed now I am 37
| and I never needed them and was entirely correct about
| what I would require later.
| weweweoo wrote:
| Personally I loved history, social science and geography,
| but none of that has been useful in working life. Being
| good at mathematics is prerequisite for nearly all well-
| paying jobs, humanities are not of much use except for
| being able to write and read well.
| boringg wrote:
| Remember that school isn't only about acquiring skills to
| leverage your lifetime earnings. Education is about
| understanding and learning the world as a whole. So
| understanding humanities history the land that we live in
| and everything else under the sun is important.
|
| Imagine that all we were was measured by the salary that
| we make and not humans and human civilization. Might as
| well just hand over our lives to the robots now.
| richrichie wrote:
| Hindsight bias?
| atoav wrote:
| This is also part of my point, e.g. having learned
| Italian for years was exhausting and mostly pointless
| when I did it, and nowadays I can somewhat understand it
| whenever I am in Italy, which is maybe every two years.
| Was that worth it for the level of skill I gained:
| probably not.
|
| But I wouldn't be able to tell if some of the mental
| agility I have today (beyond languages) could be
| attributed to the fact that I was exposed to this
| language which differs from my first languages in
| multiple ways. The lessons you may take away from any
| given subject is not necessarily limited to its raw
| content.
|
| This is a quite known topic in educational sciences, e.g.
| when answering the question why it still makes sense to
| teach kids how to do maths without a calculator in an age
| where you have it always in your pocket -- that is
| because it (A) forms an intuition about mathematical
| correctness and (B) logical and numerical thinking gets
| trained as an side effect.
|
| Ofc all of that doesn't happen when you are unlucky
| enough to have had bad teachers, but that wasn't the
| argument.
| pezezin wrote:
| In my very limited experience as an educator (I worked as
| a teacher for two years at the trade school level), I
| completely agree with your excellent comment.
|
| I would argue that sometimes students are right when they
| complaint about a subject being useless or obsolete (e.g.
| our network professor told us everything about the OSI
| protocol stack in great detail, and barely touched
| TCP/IP), but most of the time they don't know what will
| be useful later in life.
| atoav wrote:
| Yeah I mean, I can come up with 1000 lessons that would
| be utterly usless to 999 out of 1000 students in practise
| -- but that wouldn't stop me from teaching those 1000
| lessons in a way that really hooks those students to the
| topics discussed.
|
| On the flipside you can take the most essential,
| practical and important topic and deliver it with such
| dullness that everybody falls asleep.
|
| The first step in teaching (IMO) is to make people
| interested to hear what is being said. If your subject is
| useless and boring to most people you have to find a way
| to make it useful and interesting to them. This requires
| rethorical and social skills, good presentation skills
| and a deep understandingnand interest for the subjects to
| be thought.
|
| In reality most subjects have interesting bits, but is
| the task of the teacher to make them relate to the world.
| If your prof thougth you about the OSI protocol stack so
| long everybody forgot its practical applications and how
| it binds together with higher level stuff, that is
| certainly knowledge, but it doesn't help you making it
| part of your understanding of the world.
| CM30 wrote:
| Yeah, these are definitely points worth noting.
| Especially as in many cases, the way something is taught
| can have a huge effect on how well you do in
| it/understand it, and students will end up not liking
| subjects that they could have liked in university or the
| workplace.
|
| So you also have to wonder how many potential math
| prodigies we've missed out on, simply because they had a
| bad maths education at school.
| wiz21c wrote:
| In my experience, people who are really good at something
| usually are at least average on many others. Thus they can
| do the minimum in other courses to pass, it's just a matter
| of working enough.
|
| In my country, there are several students (12-18 years old)
| who can mix sport at high level (national championship) and
| a lighter school activity. They work like mad but they do
| it. But they have to prove there are good enough to get it,
| which is OK to me.
|
| Being really good is not something you appreciate yourself,
| it's the others that notice.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| In my country there is a system where a kid applying to
| high school gets accepted based on a standard test, or can
| skip the line by performing well on a contest organized by
| the ministry of education. In my class something like 80%
| of kids were admitted through contests. When applying to
| the university there's a similar thing, except it's much
| harder to skip the line, but universities are free to set
| up their own admission rules as long as the rules are based
| on the national standard test. In my case, the final
| admission score was calculated something like "90% maths
| 10% everything else"
| graemep wrote:
| That is an advantage of the British system. You have a wide
| education until 16 and sit a broad range of exams at that
| age (GCSEs) and then specialise in a few (most often three)
| subjects from 16 to 18.
|
| You usually need to pass English and maths GCSEs, but
| universities mostly care about the subjects you do in the
| last two years (except for very competitive courses).
|
| This can be a problem for those who want to keep options
| open until they are 18 (like my younger daughter).
|
| Even the system up to 16 is pretty flexible. There is a
| huge range of available subjects - although most schools
| offer only a limited selection (my kids were out of school
| by secondary school age so we had a huge choice and did
| some less usual subjects like astronomy and Latin).
| dagw wrote:
| As someone who did my GCSE's but then moved abroad before
| my A Levels and ended up taking the International
| Baccalaureate, I'm in hindsight really glad I didn't do A
| Levels. Had I stayed in England I would have studied just
| maths, physics and chemistry. Being forced by the IB
| program to also study english, philosophy and economics
| really expanded my horizons and has been huge boon to me
| in my life and I'm really happy I was afforded the
| opportunity to do so.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I did IGCSE's (the international version as I lived in
| Indonesia) and AS/A levels myself, while a lot of my
| friends who went to a different school did IB and I
| generally disagree. My most hated school years were the
| IGCSE times, exactly because I was forced into learning
| about crap I didn't care about in the slightest, like
| English Literature when all I wanted to do was the
| various sciences and especially mathematics.
|
| I feel like the IGCSE times were more than enough
| exposure to those other subjects to give me a reasonably
| well-rounded image of those subjects. Now, a decade
| later, I'm definitely glad I went the STEM route rather
| than ever touching on any humanities subjects in any
| amount of detail.
| graemep wrote:
| IGCSEs per se are a lot more flexible about that. You can
| do any subjects in any combination you like. Its a
| decision by the school to make English literature
| compulsory. Home educated kids often do not do it, on the
| other hand there are are huge number of subjects they can
| pick from: https://he-
| exams.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Subjects
|
| British universities do often (usually?) require English
| language (or an equivalent) and maths (I)GCSEs, as do
| British employers and further education colleges etc. so
| its a really bad idea to skip those.
|
| I do think its good to give kids a broad education, and
| for some it would be good to continue that for longer.
| For others (like you) its just boring.
|
| I also think there should be more opportunities for adult
| education, so if you decide later in life that you would
| like to learn about English literature or physics or
| whatever you should have a chance to do it. AT the moment
| in the UK things seem to be going the other way, with an
| over expansion of universities sucking up money, and
| further education colleges that used to offer adult
| education putting the resources into "16 to 18" courses.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Same in the Netherlands, it's become more flexible even
| since I went through school. It sucks until about age 16
| (or 17/18 if you take a higher level education that
| includes e.g. Latin / Greek), then you get to go to
| vocational education and either do a work/school combo (1
| day a week of school), or continue fulltime school for
| 3-10 years (3 years for most associate's degrees, 4 for
| bachelor's, more for a master's, and often you can go
| from the one to a higher level if you choose to).
|
| But yeah, until that age it sucks and a lot of people
| struggle because they have to do classes they aren't at
| all interested in.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > maybe you should be able to get an A++++
|
| What does an A++++ mean? I guess it's equivalent of
| publishing a novel result/idea, solving a long standing
| conjecture sort of ability? If yes then I'd say the system
| does accommodate them. Terrance Tao for example was fast
| tracked and didn't get lost in the system.
|
| Though it probably requires some effort from parents to
| figure out the right path for their prodigies.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| >but success in school requires you to be successful in
| these subjects as well
|
| It doesnt, at least in my country.
|
| Here you have a few school leaving exams that you need to
| perform at
|
| Math, native lang and english.
|
| And one at advanced level, but its your choice when it
| comes to subject.
|
| What you are talking about is GPA and GPA is meaningless
| tbf
| jncfhnb wrote:
| That's irrelevant to 99.99% of people. An A in math is not
| especially difficult to achieve.
|
| To actually be meaningfully better at math you need to go
| far, far further than the coursework presented in schools,
| at which point it becomes an extra curricular which is
| already considered. If you're a math savant proving novel
| theorems, they will notice that.
|
| But nobody gives a shit if you're just really, really good
| at factoring polynomials from Algebra 2 tests.
| leptons wrote:
| I was put into the "advanced" class in grade school, only
| to hate the increased homework load, and I missed my
| friends in the non-advanced class, so I intentionally
| refused to do the work so that I would be put back in the
| "regular" grade school classes. I was great at math, I
| taught myself fractions and algebra at a young age. I just
| didn't like spending so much time on the other subjects,
| they seemed too easy or too boring and took up too much
| school time. They wouldn't let me into the computer
| programming class in High School because I hadn't passed
| geometry, and the teacher was a total asshole - I failed
| his class, but I got an A in the make-up class with a
| different teacher. I got kicked out of electronics class
| because some other students stole stuff and blamed me for
| it - I had nothing to do with the theft, I was the
| teacher's favorite and had access to everything, I didn't
| need to steal anything, he gave me anything I wanted. God I
| hated High School so much.
|
| After graduating High School, I couldn't really see myself
| sitting through 4 more years of basically the same subject
| material - history, English, social studies, etc... when
| all I really wanted to do is use my talent in electronics
| and computers that I'd been accumulating since I was 5
| years old. So I went to a trade school for electronics and
| computers instead of a college, this was back in the late
| 80's.
|
| I can't say that not going to college hurt my job prospects
| at all, I've been highly paid for many years for doing
| something I love. Jobs hired me based on experience, not
| because I went to a college. That may have changed a bit
| now, since some tech companies favor college graduates, but
| I've worked with some college graduates that are just dumb
| as shit and couldn't get anything done - not all are like
| that, but going to college isn't an indicator of success at
| all.
| Onavo wrote:
| But if their overall SAT scores aren't good enough to get
| into the elite colleges, won't we just be denying the
| eccentric geniuses?
| coliveira wrote:
| Well, the eccentric geniuses have already left the
| system... Frankly, if you go through the last 30 years, how
| many such geniuses you can find in American universities? I
| only see a little bit higher than average, so it seems that
| the system has already eliminated the geniuses.
| clipsy wrote:
| > I only see a little bit higher than average
|
| Could you share your source for statistics on "eccentric
| geniuses"?
| theGnuMe wrote:
| I like to look at the backgrounds of the people who win the
| Nobel prize. Everyone is interdisciplinary.
|
| For college and life in general, I think main skill needed
| is emotional regulation. Everything else flows from that.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The eccentric geniuses at these elite schools will end up
| doing stupid shit for a bank.
| babyent wrote:
| I'm honestly no genius but I can relate to R in that one way.
|
| As a child I used to get all As and even got into a Stanford
| pre-collegiate program as a kid where I learned C++ and
| geometry.
|
| Unfortunately after a surgery in 9th grade that left me
| unable to attend school for 3-4 months and just terrible QOL
| for about a year my grades slipped (went from A+ studen to C
| grade student) and I basically became average. I lost all
| interest in most subjects at school due to depression and
| other things.
|
| My goal as a child was to get a Stanford JD/MD MBA (lol I
| know..), and today I have only a bachelors from a low ranked
| state college in business.
|
| I enjoyed programming so much as a kid that one summer, so
| later in life I ended up going back to it. Taught myself
| enough in a month to get on some projects as a swe. Later I
| got lucky working at a unicorn company that IPO'd.
|
| Now I am trying to build my own company and see how far I can
| get as a solo founder. Sometimes I wonder how my life would
| have turned out if it wasn't for that injury, but oh well.
| Shit happens, right?
|
| Jeez sorry for the sob story but it feels good to get it off.
| jyunwai wrote:
| Another student at a martial arts gym unexpectedly gave me
| some advice that is somewhat common, but had an impact
| because the words came at the right time and from the right
| person: he kindly told me to never judge myself based on
| the person that I might have been, and to instead compare
| myself now to how I was a month ago.
|
| I believe that any person here with an inkling of relatable
| technical experience can greatly appreciate the work you've
| been doing. Software development can be complicated and
| frustrating, especially when things don't work as you
| expect them to (but then, you learn and become better).
| Leading a business is very difficult, often due to sources
| of problems you don't expect (such as regulatory and legal
| requirements, accounting, and publicity).
|
| Some people cruise on to great careers without facing many
| barriers. But many others face unexpected setbacks and have
| to manage them. A close friend of mine was living an
| overall good life until it was profoundly disrupted by a
| civil war in his home country. But he made it to my country
| where he began his undergraduate degree at a great
| university that he loves. A past colleague of mine spent
| much of her early twenties managing physical disability,
| but successfully received treatment and went on to graduate
| with an engineering degree. She has since landed a position
| at a top aerospace company that she really wanted to work
| at.
|
| You are setting up a good life for yourself. Many people
| lack that kind of drive or struggle with executing ideas;
| several people I personally know would be very proud to one
| day experience just a small part of your successes so far.
| babyent wrote:
| Thank you for your kind response. I am happy for your
| friends and also the message you received at your gym.
|
| Life is truly a journey unique to each one of us.
|
| I've found peace and I carry a signed index card in my
| wallet on which I've written my "ethos". It took me a
| long time to come up with it and I'm sure it's common,
| but those 5 points are something I try to remain true
| towards.
|
| Cheers mate, best.
| ngc248 wrote:
| yep ... we are all running our own individual races ...
| instead of reminiscing and thinking what coulda been ...
| better to look forward and look at what we can do now.
| kiba wrote:
| I missed out on theater and improvisational comedy only
| because I pigeonholed myself as a computer nerd and
| engineering type and almost nothing else.
|
| I found that I have a certain knack for it and really enjoyed
| performing.
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| It is good to expose them. But that doesn't mean the previous
| point is backwards.
| trgn wrote:
| > College is the place to specialize in a subject.
|
| In Europe maybe, but in America a lot of students receive
| their general purpose liberal arts education in College, and
| will then specialize later with a post graduate degree.
| bonzini wrote:
| So what is high school for?
|
| Also does the above apply also to the most selective and
| renowned institutions, or only to community colleges?
| trgn wrote:
| High school is preparing to be able to do a college
| education? A bachelor's isn't that trivial most of the
| time.
|
| I'd say applies to most colleges, of any size. Community
| colleges tend to be more like trade schools
| bonzini wrote:
| In Europe high school is when you get a generic
| education, and in college you choose your topic. So if
| you are a languages major you'll have no more math, if
| you're a STEM major you'll have no more history, if
| you're a philosophy major you might have logic and some
| history but no physics or linear algebra, and so on.
|
| I studied computer science (M.Eng.) and I had to provide
| an English certification as a foreign language, but that
| was it. The only non-computer science, non-math, non-
| electronics courses were one semester of chemistry, one
| of economics and three of physics (which you could say is
| related to electronics though). So basically 15-20%.
|
| Having to study more history or biology would have been a
| huge waste of time in a CS university, and I say that as
| someone who did more Latin and Greek than math and
| physics in high school.
| llm_trw wrote:
| To quote an artist friend: exposure is good until you die
| from it.
|
| Being forced to do subjects that you hate is not exposure, it
| is being forced to do things which you are completely
| unsuited for.
|
| I would go so far as saying that being forced to take music
| until 7th grade put me off any musical pursuits for the next
| 20 years. The less said about the torture disguised as
| education that is PE the better.
| jajko wrote:
| Yeah that's a common result of forced learning by lets be
| polite mediocre folks. Utter hate of the whole topic for
| easily 2 decades too. Then finding slowly my own personal
| way back to them, despite school.
|
| If anything, current (and this is valid globally) school
| system is not designed at excellence at its core, its about
| raising an army of obedient but not too stupid citizens.
| And its not missed expectation, just look at what type of
| work they expect to fill in. Don't expect massive changes
| unless society changes itself.
|
| Some narrow excellence is not what our society at large
| values, those few that made it through made it _despite_
| their environment.
| db48x wrote:
| Specialization does begin earlier than that. Most high
| schools in the US have advanced classes that students can opt
| in to, and there is the AP program.
|
| Personally I think that we could do better by tailoring every
| student's education to their abilities. Put in simplest
| possible terms, we could arrange classes by complexity rather
| than by year. Have one class for addition and subtraction,
| another for multiplication and division, then geometry,
| algebra, etc, etc. Then let students graduate from one to the
| next based on proven ability rather than by age. Do the same
| for language, history, etc. Let every student proceed through
| the courses at their own speed.
| angled wrote:
| One such school:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School
|
| The kids that went there ... some succeeded, some really
| struggled to adjust to other schools and environments.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| A bit too late if you are comparing to football level of
| specialization to produce people like messi
| eviks wrote:
| "Exposure" would be spending much much less time on those
| subjects, especially the free home time. Then the number of
| subjects is practically infinite, so expecting "most" is just
| as unrealistic (and colleges also continue this "exposure")
| paulpauper wrote:
| _It 's good that public school exposes children to many
| subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover
| if they click with one of them. The real danger is that
| someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is
| the place to specialize in a subject._
|
| then why does this 'discovery process' have to continue into
| college? That was the OP's point. When money and time is on
| the line, let adults decide what they want to study. An
| 18-year-old is no longer a child.
| energy123 wrote:
| The exposure to subjects isn't the problem, this is the
| problem: https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
| echelon wrote:
| > It's good that public school exposes children to many
| subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover
| if they click with one of them. The real danger is that
| someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is
| the place to specialize in a subject.
|
| While some exposure is probably better on average than none,
| in some instances bad experiences can trip the fuse on
| developing an interest.
|
| The rote nature of canned education, bad teachers, bad
| parents, or bullies can turn kids off of subjects they might
| otherwise come to love.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Is it "good", certainly, but I don't think most of the stuff
| is worth it in the technological world. Let kids follow their
| interests, keep the general stuff to a minimum and you will
| have a lot more of happy kids with who excel more.
| flockonus wrote:
| To overemphasize in a complex topic as good | bad is overly
| simplistic and doesn't help at all. Hardly anything is
| complete good or completely bad, it's meaningless to make a
| black or white point.
| bluecalm wrote:
| The problem is that there is too much of this general
| exposure and specialization happens way too late once the
| brain is not as good at learning anymore. People peak in
| competitive fields when they are in early 20s or even before
| that. In our education system we are not even allowed to do
| the job before we are like 25 or later. There is only so much
| you can learn sitting in a chair listening to a professor.
| It's a completely backwards system that limits potential of
| about anyone with average+ intelligence.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It's good that schools _expose_ children to many subjects.
|
| It's not good at all that school reward being OK in every
| subject more than being really good in a handful of them. The
| school system is a mediocrity factory.
| is_true wrote:
| A subject "clicking" is strongly dependent on the teacher.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| The miss, which in my state has changed recently, was kicking
| kids out eventually who failed one subject but were
| succeeding in others. Sure, that kid isn't going to an Ivy
| League school, but there's value in finding ways to make up
| for what they aren't getting versus producing a high school
| dropout with bleak prospects in today's society.
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| Agreed. Given that most people are not exceptional at
| anything it makes more sense to give them a well rounded
| education by exposing them to a lot of subjects to see what
| takes. And all the exceptional people, well, they're just
| gonna have to use their gifts to push through the monotony of
| the things they don't like while still pursing their passion.
|
| Unless they are born wealthy or find a benefactor so they can
| go to private school or a gifted person school, that caters
| to their specific needs, it's the best we can do to serve
| everyone.
| m463 wrote:
| your thought reminded me of the radio program about Jean
| Shepherd getting his Class A radio license.
|
| https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/factoids/Jean-Shepherd-Cla...
|
| on youtube as well
| p1necone wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I only have a successful career because I
| deeply enjoy programming and have a slightly neurotic obsession
| with code quality and ergonomics. I can't fathom giving enough
| of a shit about anything I don't enjoy for long enough to be
| successful otherwise.
| barrettondricka wrote:
| The best way to learn is to play and come up with stuff
| yourself. But playing doesn't get you anywhere specific. People
| who play around a lot, clearly know much more and in depth than
| everyone else, but when you hand them a random checklist,
| chances are they won't know a few.
|
| Standardized tests are screwing everything up. People who learn
| on their own might stumble upon the entire alphabet except for
| the letter "B," but standardized tests want only the first 5
| letters. Hence the incredible efficiency of knowing the entire
| alphabet is thrown under the bus in favor of making sure none
| of the 5 are missing.
|
| You can't teach someone to play, and there is no way to play
| systematically, at scale, and with guaranteed results. All the
| incredible people I know have some hole in "basic" knowledge,
| and if it is revealed nobody cares about them being miles ahead
| elsewhere. "Their basics seem lacking, in the name of stability
| and norm, throw them back to square one."
|
| Following standards never produces something new, but the world
| is so afraid of failure and lack of definitions in "messing
| around" that they are willing to trade their souls for it.
|
| Take any hacker here on HN, and ask how much they learned in CS
| class vs. how much they learned messing around with Perl on a
| weekend.
| kiba wrote:
| Standardized tests are tool for systems to be able to compare
| and work toward a uniformity of outcome. Expecting it to help
| anything beyond that is a foolish errand. Public schools need
| to educate million of people each years with differing
| deposition and life circumstances and do so with relative
| competency.
|
| Excellence requires individual attention and cannot be so
| readily mass produced.
| coliveira wrote:
| > and do so with relative competency
|
| I dispute this on the grounds that students are going
| through American schools and many of them don't even know
| how to read.
| kiba wrote:
| 92% of adults know how to read to varying level.[1]
|
| The number, while high, is not satisfactory. Clearly, we
| also want adults to be functionally and not pass a super
| low bar of being able to read a sentence which 92% does
| not care to distinguish, but it is not fact true that
| "many of them don't even know how to read".
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_S
| tates
| amenhotep wrote:
| In terms of not being able to read, I would count 8% as
| "many"? Select a group of ten random Americans and you'd
| expect one of them to be illiterate - that's appalling.
| coliveira wrote:
| Right there you have 8%. But it is worse because it says
| they're able to "read to varying level", which includes
| 2nd grade level, or barely at all.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I agree. That's also why I just don't believe at all when
| people say we have a shortage of talent (as in we need stuff
| like H1B) there is a ton of talent wasted. Everyone know that
| smart person who is working a menial job.
| asciimov wrote:
| In my experience it's not talent but opportunity that is in
| short supply. One of the smartest people I know is an
| electrician, simply because he grew up in a rural area and
| couldn't afford to leave for college.
| tightbookkeeper wrote:
| But if you notice the people who are in administrative
| positions are the people who are "well rounded" not those who
| are good at one thing.
|
| Even within academic stem fields you have people who know how
| to promote and speak and they have the most influence.
|
| I guess what I'm trying to say is the system is mostly
| selecting for what it wants.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Education is optimized for average citizen who must work
| through boring tasks every day. I feel like geniuses probably
| more like survive in school rather than being supported.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| These people are still out there. When I was in high school we
| had the normal people, then people who took advanced placement
| stuff, then the "super nerds" who were at the top of all the
| advanced placement stuff with perfect grades, and then there
| was this one guy who was most of the way through all the
| advanced math classes at the nearby university. Same guy was in
| one of my English classes, and was failing. More or less he
| couldn't be bothered.
|
| Sadly the later part of your comment may hold - I don't
| remember what ended up happening with him, whether he graduated
| high school or what. Hopefully at that level you just disappear
| into academia and not off the face of the earth in general.
| readenough wrote:
| Everyone here seems to have missed the significance of L.J.
| Rogers in this story.
| graycat wrote:
| > But what if those just aren't interesting to someone?
|
| The school I went to grades 1--12 tried to be especially _good_
| so taught Latin, French. Some of the girls were in ballet. MIT
| came recruiting. The year before me two guys went to Princeton
| and ran against each other for President of the Freshman Class
| (whatever that meant!). In my class, one guy (did nearly as
| well on the SAT Math as I did!!!) went to MIT.
|
| In one of the early grades, I got dumped on (adenoids, couldn't
| hear well until that got fixed). Apparently the teachers talked
| to each other and had me with a dunce cap until I proved
| otherwise. In 1st algebra, discovered math: I liked it, was
| good at it, was the best in the class, proved myself, got sent
| to a math tournament, couldn't get dumped on, etc. Continued
| that way: Was so good at math that I got an unspoken but
| powerful _by_ in any subject, e.g., English literature, I didn
| 't like.
|
| Got sent to summer math/physics _enrichment_ programs.
|
| So, for that example, for
|
| > But what if those just aren't interesting to someone?
|
| some schools will let a student who is good at some one subject
| get a _by_ in other subjects.
|
| Really, schools, K-Ph.D., have a tough time finding any
| students really good in even just one subject, are thrilled
| when they find one that is, and don't want to block him/her
| because he viewed fictional literature as a not very credible
| presentation of common reality?
|
| That _by_ pattern continued: In grad school, they insisted that
| I take their computer science course. My background in
| computing was already nicely above that course, and I 'd
| already taught a similar course at Georgetown. Soooo, mostly
| laughed at the course: E.g., they had a test question about
| Quicksort (very common topic then), and I answered with
| material they didn't know.
|
| The best case of _by_ : Took a _reading course_ ; decided to
| address a question in the pure math of optimization; two weeks
| later had a surprising theorem and from that an answer to the
| question. The work, clearly publishable, was instant news all
| over the department, some profs angry that I had done well,
| others pleased. Angry/pleased, the work got me a general
| purpose _by_ , a gold crown, immunity from any criticism, and
| an unspoken, implicit, easy path to the rest of the Ph.D.
| loveparade wrote:
| If you are optimizing for finding geniuses like R, you may be
| right. Many probably fall through the cracks of the educational
| system. But I don't think this is what we are or should be
| optimizing for. The vast majority of people would end up
| unemployable if they weren't "forced" to study things they
| don't enjoy because some skills are just more employable than
| others. You're lucky if you enjoy engineering/science, but not
| so lucky if you only care about art literature.
| slibhb wrote:
| You're assuming it's luck. But maybe we're actually good at
| identifying boundary-pushing geniuses? There are huge, huge
| incentives for being good at that.
| nurettin wrote:
| > I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the
| chores of homework and getting through boring classes is
| busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A.
|
| Zero? If you qualify as a prodigy, it is apparent from a young
| age. Maths prodigies are especially easy to distinguish. Given
| a little time, they will self-learn, grok and innovate on
| anything you throw at them and will likely attend higher
| education early unlike "the brilliant kid"s who will struggle
| with advanced concepts all their lives.
| acka wrote:
| It seems you are assuming that all child prodigies are
| polymaths (no pun intended).
|
| There are children with exceptional mental abilities in a
| limited range of topics or even a single topic, such as math,
| music or drawing, They may struggle to various degrees with
| subjects or life skills that don't correspond closely with
| their specific topics of interest and ability.
| swayvil wrote:
| you can't serve two masters.
|
| How would you characterize R's master and the "normie" master?
| ji_zai wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| It's the crazy ones that push humanity forward. We lose far
| more than we can imagine by not enabling even just one of them.
| This is one of the most important problems for us to fix.
| kiba wrote:
| We shouldn't need crazy people to push the boundary. Rather,
| the crazier you are, the more likely you will flame out.
|
| People who are "weird" and yet are entirely functional are
| the best of both world and a much rarer combination.
| geodel wrote:
| > People like R would be lost in the sea of averages because
| their genius would be kept shut by norms.
|
| Well norms were in place when R did his work. Even the most
| strict systems have made concessions for extraordinary people.
| It is just that mostly average people go around claiming they'd
| be genius, had system not smothered their creativity.
|
| > I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the
| chores of homework..
|
| I think from not many to hardly any as I can't believe if kids
| who are really genius can just go on for more than a decade of
| primary schooling without ever finding outlet for their
| creativity.
| yumraj wrote:
| Now think about the college admission process in the US, where
| kids are expected to take arbitrary number of AP courses and
| get 5 in all of them, and write world class essays about
| passion and solving world hunger while excelling at several
| extra curricular activities and showing leadership and so on
| and on.....
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| You're applying the logic of "that someone" is "Ramanujan", but
| the system isn't designed around students at the extremes.
|
| Generally I think: "Unless you're Ramanujan, then you should
| probably have some breadth to your knowledge rather than pure
| depth" is not a terrible policy.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I have always been only interested in the 'exact' sciences
| since I was a little kid; I did not do other things even if I
| had to. I just didn't turn up; I was doing 'more important
| stuff'. I graduated with a special letter from the queen; all
| aces for exact sciences and the rest massive fail. It turned
| out that this made me a good programmer and employer, so I made
| a shitload of money (in eu terms; pocket change compared to
| what usa peers did). But it was a big mistake; now I really
| want to learn languages and history, but I never had the basics
| as a kid so I struggle far more than my peers. My ability to
| memorize things is not very good as I never needed to in
| school; formulas and code is not really memorizing as such I
| found. It is a massive regret. There are no do overs, but I
| guess even if I could time travel, I would've not be able to
| explain this to myself enough for me to listen.
| returnInfinity wrote:
| What we need to do is, make the subjects interesting to learn
| with tech.
|
| It may now be possible with Videos, Games and VR.
| NamTaf wrote:
| Tech is not necessary. You just have to make the subjects
| interesting to learn. Good teachers are way more value than
| they are valued, and will make the classes interesting to
| learn.
| js8 wrote:
| Well, my solution would be this:
|
| Instead of giving kids grades with a ceiling, each subject
| would have (unlimited number of) levels of proficiency, and to
| attain a level, kids would have to pass a test (demonstrate
| certain skill). The choice of subjects and levels to attain
| would be up to each kid, but they would have to choose to do
| something (working at getting next level of something would be
| mandatory). (Although perhaps they should be encouraged to
| explore different subjects and attain some minimum of levels.)
|
| Also, I would group kids by subject, and not by age. So kids of
| slightly different levels would train together, and the higher
| level kids would be obligated to help kids on lower level to
| learn, while lower level kids were taught to be respectful of
| higher level kids.
| ddfs123 wrote:
| >Also, I would group kids by subject, and not by age.
|
| I would be cautious with this, they may have the same
| academic ability but a large gap in social skills.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Why is that worse than having large gaps in academic
| ability and social skills?
| philwelch wrote:
| Ramanujan was, what, a 1 in 100,000,000 level genius? The gap
| between Ramanujan and the average class valedictorian is much
| wider than the gap between the class valedictorian and the
| average student. I think if we optimize schooling for people
| like him, we are probably not going to do as well for the other
| 99,999,999 students.
|
| We probably aren't going to get it quite right for that 1,
| either. Extreme outlier geniuses are extreme outliers and
| there's no easily generalizable pattern around them. The ideal
| education for a young Ramanujan is probably different from the
| ideal education for a young Von Neumann. Of course in an ideal
| world we would give an extremely individualized education to
| every child, but that's much easier said than done. Failing
| that maybe we could identify and then invest in the extreme
| geniuses, but that's what we already try to do.
| trueismywork wrote:
| I was this person, also from India. I am interested in most
| topics under the sun, but was never interested in being an
| excellent student, apart from math where I was ranked in top 30
| in my national olympiads.
|
| I got mediocre marks in high school but thankfully did well in
| JEE. Now I have a decent PhD in math with an extremely mediocre
| school record.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Unfortunately, the purpose of the education system at this
| stage of human civilization development is not the realization
| of individual potential or the creation of geniuses. Geniuses,
| however cool they may be, are not necessarily the most
| effective increase in unit production efficiency per person
| that you can create. The point of the education system is
| essentially to create workers that make the economy productive.
|
| I don't think you can say, even all these years later, that
| Ramanujan, that mathematician, made the economy more
| productive, but he certainly increased the high watermark of
| human civilization and created an inspiring story for
| individual achievement, creative realization, and artistic and
| mathematical expression. There's something sublime and
| transcendental--no pun intended--in the kind of truths that he
| was able to tease out and the unique, idiosyncratic way that he
| expressed them. Sort of like a Basquiat of mathematics, I
| suppose. Or probably better than that.
|
| That aside, I think it's unfortunate that he died of cholera or
| something, isn't it? I mean, he apparently didn't think it was
| unfortunate that he was going to die. And certainly, the formal
| education system didn't necessarily fail him, in that a
| professor at a university recognized his genius and sponsored
| him to the UK.
|
| But I think, in a sense that you identify, there is this
| general failure of the education systems in the human
| civilizations on this planet to foster perhaps the best thing
| that they could be fostering. They're more like a manufacturing
| assembly line to produce cogs as part of the economic machine.
|
| Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that. I think
| it's good that people can have a role to play in the larger
| economy and that there are pathways to bring people to the
| level of capability where they can contribute like that. But
| the lack of pathways that these systems provide--those that
| could contribute to the creation of the full realization and
| expression of individual potential--I think is sad. And I think
| that's what you're kind of identifying.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| > My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while
| that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and
| he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn't pushing
| the boundaries of medical science.
|
| You seem like someone who thinks things through, so I suspect
| you'll know what I'm about to say, but given the sentiment of
| your comment, I think it's worth explicitly sharing this:
|
| The fact that your class valedictorian went on to be a doctor
| is great. Not everyone needs to push the boundaries. Your
| classmate may end up saving/helping countless lives.
| silvestrov wrote:
| He isn't saying that being a doctor isn't great.
|
| He is saying that the people who add _most_ value to science
| isn 't always the ones who are at the top of the hierarchy in
| the school system.
|
| Performing well in school is like a F1 racing car: very fast,
| but can only go on paths very well trodden already, i.e.
| paved road.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Please excuse my misinterpreting OP's comment, and thank
| you for clarifying.
| ken47 wrote:
| You're absolutely right. The education system was meant to be a
| factory of production line workers, at the cost of missing out
| on geniuses who don't care about other subjects.
|
| This system is meant for a worker that no longer exists. If
| someone wants to specialize at the age of 13 and has shown
| reasonable aptitude in that subject, then let them do it. Sure,
| give them a well rounded education, but don't weight those
| grades anywhere close to equally.
| de_elusive wrote:
| School is for training good test-takers, not finding geniuses.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while
| that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and
| he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn't pushing
| the boundaries of medical science._
|
| I think in this example you are vastly overestimating the
| "average genius", in comparison to those rare few who truly
| push the boundaries. We tend to do this because of the way our
| brains estimate things of significant scale, like the fact that
| keeps floating around social media about how bad most of us are
| at having a concept of the difference between thousands,
| millions, and billions.
|
| There are many valedictorians (of the order of some per
| thousand) but few Ramanujans (of the order of tens per
| billion?), and gearing an overall education system specifically
| for those few could do a disservice to a great many others at
| every level below. Ramanujan was not the result of an effective
| education system anyway: like a lot of other world changing
| minds he was largely self-taught. Perhaps there is room to
| encourage more investigation to the side of the curriculum a
| lot more than we currently do, but the problems that stop other
| "Ramanujan"s, that could so easily have scuppered Ramanujan
| himself, are usually not caused by the education system but by
| other societal problems (death & disease, racism, sexism, caste
| or class biases, etc.) not giving them a chance to explore &
| self-learn or have useful access to education & other resources
| at all. Addressing those problems will help a much wider chunk
| of the population, as well as reducing constraints for the
| truly exceptional geniuses1 amongst them.
|
| ----
|
| [1] And of course those non-geniuses who luck out and have that
| one brilliant idea. Their contribution is often vital for
| progress too, and I'd wager that there are orders of magnitude
| more of them than there are true geniuses!
| moomin wrote:
| Honestly I suspect a lot of potentially able people get left by
| the wayside in our lowest cost educational system. It's
| particularly tough on neurodiverse people, which one has to
| suspect included Ramanujan.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > But what if those just aren't interesting to someone?
|
| That doesn't matter. A student is unable to evaluate the value
| of unknown subjects and the synergy between subjects. People
| are often unmotivated to do important things, because we are
| just lazy s**.
|
| > I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the
| chores of homework and getting through boring classes is
| busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A.
|
| And how many lunatics making wrong decisions did we prevented
| by forcing them to learn necessary things?
|
| > Meanwhile, hardly anyone actually remembers anything about
| those topics
|
| They are engraved in your mind. Even when you don't remember
| every little detail, they still helped you in forming your
| understanding of the world.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| There is an Isaiah Berlin essay called The Hedgehog and the
| Fox. In it he divides artists/philosophers into two categories:
| foxes and hedgehogs. It is inspired by a fragment of ancient
| Greek poetry which reads, "the fox knows many things, but the
| hedgehog knows one great thing." In other words, some great
| thinkers looked at the world through the lens of one big idea,
| and others can't be easily reduced.
|
| Two major caveats. The first is that Berlin never wanted the
| essay to be taken all that seriously. To him, it was an
| intellectually parlor game. But if TvTropes is any indication,
| people are addicted to classifying things into simplistic
| categories, so the fox and hedgehog game took off.
|
| Second, the rest of the essay actually challenges the binary by
| focusing on Leo Tolstoy, an unimaginably creative thinker and
| writer who, according to Berlin, was a fox by nature but wanted
| to be a hedgehog.
|
| Why did I share all of that? Well, without taking the
| categories too seriously I do think some people are more foxy
| by nature and others are more hedgehog-esque. I've always
| thought of myself as a fox (which to be honest, might limit
| me), and I had no interest in focusing on a single subject in
| school. At worst, I'm a dilettante who can have a surface level
| conversation about any intellectual topic at a party. At best,
| I can muster up a real enthusiasm about trying something
| entirely new.
|
| I say all this not just because I'm running on 4 hours of
| sleep, but also because I think foxes get a bad rap. Not
| everybody should strive to be Ramanujan, because it isn't in
| everybody's temperament.
| gaoshan wrote:
| "...they weren't interesting to him". That's how I felt about
| mathematics. History, literature and language were the areas I
| was interested in, for example. It seems to me that an
| individual's strengths aren't necessarily indicative of an all-
| encompassing genius. Rather, they are often more focused, tied
| to specific subjects or fields in which that person naturally
| excels. That's not to say an individual can't have a wide range
| of strengths.
| amunozo wrote:
| Exposing students to other subjects is what make them discover
| what they like. I think the optimal balance would be studying a
| wide number of subjects, but being able to select for an even
| larger set.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > every extraordinary person [was] 1 step away from being
| forgotten, and got some huge universal break
|
| Being a genius is a phenomenon of the individual, but being
| able to pursue one's talent is a social aspect of the
| phenomenon of civilisation.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Meanwhile, I'd be working a backhoe in the middle of nowhere
| Louisiana if someone hadn't put books in my hands and forced me
| to read them under penalty of failure. Standards aren't
| standards because they're fun. They're standards because you
| need them to have fully functioning, working societies.
|
| The US political system is currently in a state of utter
| dysfunction because people have decided that facts "just aren't
| interesting."
| redbell wrote:
| > People like R would be lost in the sea of averages because
| their genius would be kept shut by norms.
|
| I have a family member who scored perfectly in math on the
| final exam of middle school but failed other subjects so badly
| that he couldn't advance to high school. What frustrated us
| even more was that the next year, he achieved a perfect score
| in math again but still failed overall, leaving him no choice
| but to drop out of school.
|
| This story has stuck with me for years, highlighting how our
| education system focuses solely on maintaining an overall
| average score above a certain threshold without considering how
| individual subjects are mastered.
|
| I can't help but think that if he had been allowed to pursue
| mathematics, he might have accomplished something great. It's
| really disheartening.
| hilux wrote:
| What better system do you propose to identify and nurture the
| one-in-a-million genius (the productive genius, not the crazy
| genius) while also serving tens of thousands of smart strivers,
| as well as the vast majority of the rest?
|
| I don't think we can or should design a system optimized for
| that one-in-a-million genius. It would be worse for everyone
| else, and ultimately for society.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Ramanujan's story is very interesting but I would love more
| Indian mathematicians and scientists to become household names.
| Mathematicians like Harish Chandra, C. R. Rao, Manjul Bhargava,
| Narendra Karmakar etc. Physicists like C. V. Raman, Satyendra
| Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha. Others like Har Gobind Khorana and
| Venkatraman Ramakrishnan too.
| sulam wrote:
| Fwiw Chandra, Rao, and Bose are instantly recognizable to me.
| I'm not a mathematician or physicist and don't know the other
| folks. That said I am very aware that Indians have made
| significant contributions to math, physics and I imagine other
| disciplines.
| profsummergig wrote:
| When I first encountered the Mahalanobis distance, I thought it
| sounded strangely Indian. Turned out it was!
| ks2048 wrote:
| You're right, some Indians don't have the recognition they
| deserve, but if it makes you feel better, few "western"
| mathematicians or scientists are household names either.
| esperent wrote:
| However, pretty much all of the ones who are household names,
| are western.
|
| Well, at least to western people. Are Indians more familiar
| with Indian scientists?
| your_challenger wrote:
| Amoung the people who are interested in science? Yes. But
| to the general public? No.
|
| I don't think a non STEM guy would know Ramanujan or C V
| Raman.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| C V Raman's name is known via school text books; though
| granted that few would remember it unless they carry on
| with STEM.
| Lutger wrote:
| Household names (in the west) are maybe Aristotle, Galileo,
| Newton and Einstein. If you are lucky. For a lot of people
| it is just Einstein, that's it.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| > Satyendra Nath Bose
|
| I imagine most people won't recognise the name. But everyone's
| heard of a _boson_. So he 's somewhat immortalised -- more than
| most.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| I've noticed India seems to be full of ring theorists/algebraic
| geometers. I wonder if that's actually true and, if so, why.
| nasalspirant wrote:
| Part of the answer is that research funding in India is
| predominantly from the public sector, and investments in pure
| science research have been low for a long time (not that
| applied sciences are doing much better). Thus many
| researchers lack the resources for experimental science
| whereas theoretical study is more accessible.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Ah. I was only comparing with other 'pure' disciplines like
| analysis and topology/geometry, but I guess these are still
| more strongly connected to applied things.
| rramadass wrote:
| This is entirely the fault of the Indian Education System and
| Popular Media. The current generation knows almost nothing
| about these Indian Greats.
|
| In order to rectify the status quo;
|
| 1) Everybody should get the monthly magazine _Science Reporter_
| published by National Institute of Science Communication and
| Policy Research (NIScPR), Council of Scientific and Industrial
| Research (CSIR), New Delhi, India. which gives a overview into
| Indian Science - https://sciencereporter.niscpr.res.in/
|
| 2) The two-volume _The Mind of an Engineer by Purnendu Ghosh et
| al._ published by Springer contains essays from many of our
| recent Scientists /Researchers/Engineers etc. -
| https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0119-2
|
| 3) Books on Indian Science/Scientists by various authors are
| available on Amazon India and are worth getting.
|
| 4) Also see the books by the great astrophysicist/cosmologist
| Jayant Narlikar
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayant_Narlikar), specifically;
| _The Scientific Edge: The Indian Scientist From Vedic To Modern
| Times._ - https://www.penguin.co.in/book/the-scientific-edge/
| and _Science and Mathematics: From Primitive to Modern Times_ -
| https://www.routledge.com/Science-and-Mathematics-From-Primi...
| kadal wrote:
| To this excellent list, I would humbly add Bhavana:
| https://bhavana.org.in/
| rramadass wrote:
| Great; I didn't know of this Mathematics magazine.
| rramadass wrote:
| Two More;
|
| a) Resonance : Journal of Science Education published by
| Indian Academy of Sciences - https://www.ias.ac.in/Journals
| /Resonance_Journal_of_Science_...
|
| b) Science India magazine published by Vijnana Bharati-
| https://scienceindiamag.in/
| billfruit wrote:
| Physicists like Subrahmanyam Chandrashekhar and George
| Sudarshan. Also Mahalanobis for statistics.
|
| And Mani Chandy for computer science.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Chandras(h?)ekhar is already there, at least if you're the
| kind of nerd who knows about physics at all. Probably even
| more so than Ramanujan, but that could just be my science
| bias as a kid.
| chompychop wrote:
| Manjul Bhargava is not Indian.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| You're right, I can't edit my comment anymore though.
| the-mitr wrote:
| Universities press in India had bought out a series of books by
| G Venkataraman called Vignettes in Physics it also had books on
| Saha, Bhabha, Bose, Chandra and Raman.
| https://universitiespress.com/books?id=0&sid=161
|
| National Book Trust also has several books on Indian
| scientists.
| seanhunter wrote:
| What about Madhava of Sangamagrama[1], who (among other things)
| described various Taylor expansions for trigonometric functions
| (including an estimate of the error term) in the 14th century?
| (ie 300 years before James Gregory discovered the method for
| the Taylor expansion in the West).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhava_of_Sangamagrama
| profsummergig wrote:
| In the Ramanujan story, a true MVP is G.H. Hardy. He read letters
| from some random unknown guy (a savage "native" no less!) half
| the world away, and took them seriously. And then organized
| resources to have that guy travel to England. A true MVP. All the
| others Ramanujan wrote to ignored him (understandably so). Such a
| tragedy that he died so young.
| paulddraper wrote:
| If it had not been for Hardy, we would know a fraction of what
| R did.
| kumarm wrote:
| If you want to understand how human potential was wasted in old
| world, Ramanujan belongs to a caste in India that is only caste
| that is supposed to be educated (Representing probably < 5% of
| population) in those days.
|
| Ramanujan short life itself is a loss to the world, Imagine how
| many Ramanujan's were ignored where there is no G.H. Hardy and
| what about Ramanujans in the other 95%?
| maeil wrote:
| In the New World, the Ramanujans' lives are spent optimizing
| high-frequency trading, ads or video recommendation
| algorithms. This is arguably even worse for society than them
| not being discovered altogethrt.
| fragmede wrote:
| Arguably. Assuming that's actually where they end up, they
| earn lots of money and they get to choose what they want to
| do with it. We should force them to be mathematicians if
| they didn't want to be?
|
| The other version in the West is he moves to rural Montana
| and sends bombs through the mail.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Those bombs might have done more good than his potential
| math career. Considering we just had our first AI
| millionaire. Perhaps there is hope for humanity to wake
| up.
| sealeck wrote:
| > The other version in the West is he moves to rural
| Montana and sends bombs through the mail.
|
| There might be a middle ground between the two?
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| I think they're talking about specifically the Unabomber,
| who was known to be a math genius too.
| sealeck wrote:
| I'm aware of that.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > Assuming that's actually where they end up, they earn
| lots of money and they get to choose what they want to do
| with it. We should force them to be mathematicians if
| they didn't want to be?
|
| I think that if you tried you could imagine a world where
| Ramanujans are both supported and respected with nice
| lives, while _also_ contributing to the future of the
| species rather than helping dig our own grave.
|
| > The other version in the West is he moves to rural
| Montana and sends bombs through the mail.
|
| Why in the world would those be the only two options??
| What a profoundly strange thing to say.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| People like Ramanujan are on a different planet compared to
| your everyday PhD working stiffs. There's smart (PhD),
| there's genius (Einstein, Feynman, von Neumann), and then
| there are freaks of nature like Ramanujan.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I'm an atheist, but why not take Ramanujan at his word
| when he says that god(s) gives him his equations?
|
| I for one would ask him what we could do to make it
| easier for him to listen to the voice of god(s) rather
| than say "well akshually..."
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Well, he's dead, so there's that ...
|
| I'm not sure there's much you can do to help someone at
| this level, other than perhaps take away outside
| distractions.
|
| It's not remotely clear how Ramanujan's mind worked, or
| whether he really knew himself. He seems to have been a
| lot more highly functioning than an idiot savant, but
| still operating at a level that is hard to comprehend.
| Was this an expression of humility or devotion by
| Ramanujan, or was he just expressing his own lack of
| understanding of how his mind worked?
| regularfry wrote:
| There's a parallel there to Feynman, if you squint a bit.
| He seems to have been synaesthetic in a way that let him
| use the sensory part of his brain as a maths coprocessor,
| and he didn't understand it himself.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Feymann seems more understandable. He wanted to
| understand everything from first principles and derive it
| all himself, and spent a lifetime doing so, building
| himself up. He developed a huge repertoire of insights
| and mathematical tricks/approaches that could be brought
| to bear on whatever he put his mind to... It seems like
| he trained his mind to become what it was. The end result
| was of course incredible, and he would instantly or
| within hours see solutions to problems that colleagues
| had been stuck on for months.
|
| Feynmann, like von Neumann, also seems more
| approachable/understandable in that he wasn't just
| operating at genius level, but was also a regular fun
| loving guy (strip clubs, bongo drums, safe hacking and
| all). Von Neumann and some of his Hungarian peers were
| famously referred to as "The Martians", but it's really
| Ramanujan who seems like the alien.
| mangodrunk wrote:
| Ramanujan is obviously very gifted and was able to do
| exceptionally well given his circumstances, but to put
| him higher than those that you listed is wrong to me.
| There are many more mathematicians who solved problems
| that have more impact and those that started new branches
| of math. Ramanujan is overrated in my opinion.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I couldn't comment on the impact of his work, which
| anyways is evidentially still unfolding, but the WAY he
| seems to have worked is just bizarre - coming up with
| these deep baffling series formulae offered without
| proof. His mind seems to have worked in an extraordinary
| way.
| n4r9 wrote:
| It's true that the unconscious way he came about his
| theorems puts him in a different category to other famous
| names. But I wouldn't rank him as highly as Von Neumann.
| That man made groundbreaking results in the foundations
| of mathematics, pure and applied mathematics, early
| computer science, quantum mechanics, economics, and more.
| I think Von Neumann might arguably be the most
| significant genius of the 20th Century, paralleled in
| history only perhaps by the likes of Newton and Leibniz.
|
| Einstein made a few extremely valuable insights in
| theoretical physics, but I'd say the sheer breadth of
| comparable work that Von Neumann did across multiple
| fields makes him more outstanding.
| mangodrunk wrote:
| He studied very hard and was exceptionally gifted, it
| wasn't a mystery.
| elgenie wrote:
| Ramanujan himself survived childhood smallpox and died at
| just 32 from what's thought to be complications from an
| earlier bout with dysentery. But he had lucked out in that he
| was born male in an urban setting in a high caste, with
| access to education, textbooks, and the language of the
| imperial core, and managed to make it to adulthood at all.
|
| "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and
| convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty
| that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton
| fields and sweatshops." ~ Stephen Jay Gould
| scotty79 wrote:
| If we individual makeup was so irrelevant we wouldn't have
| just had me Ramanujan so far. Although I agree that
| Einstein is probably very unremarkable and was mostly the
| right (genius) person in the right place at the right time
| in history of science to marry together things other people
| figured out and sprinkle some unique framing onto that.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| It's not that individual makeup is so irrelevant, it's
| that if we assume (potential) Einsteins and Ramanujans
| follow a normal distribution (or really any random
| distribution), then the fact that so many people in the
| world live in situations where any genius will simply
| never be noticed means we are necessarily missing out on
| the vast majority of them.
| uncharted9 wrote:
| This is such a common and dangerous rhetoric, which has been
| repeated millions of times in India today, that people are
| willing to believe that one community has wickedly tried to
| subjugate everyone by denying them the right to education.
| But this is completely false. The early government records of
| British India themselves attempt to record detailed
| demographic records of the communities that studied in the
| early 'modern' schools. And no, the Brahmins didn't have a
| monopoly.
|
| This is similar to another popular narrative that no girl
| received an education until some sympathetic Englishman in
| partnership with a local woman allowed girls to go to school.
| What a load of BS.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| This is why education and opportunities should be available
| for all, regardless of social / economic status. I reaped the
| benefits from that in the Netherlands where the government
| paid for most of my education (bachelor equivalent) and
| consequent professional life (white collar / middle class),
| instead of staying in my parents' / ancestors' "class" (blue
| collar / working class).
|
| But people in the upper classes don't like that, so they're
| telling working class people that people even worse off are
| after their jobs.
| ykrishnan wrote:
| > ...only caste that is supposed to be educated...
|
| Tall claim.
| 1024core wrote:
| People in the West love to attribute everything in India to
| caste.
| gen_greyface wrote:
| caste system in india is an evil that persists even today,
| and is a complex topic. majority of the indian-origin users
| on hackernews or people in the IT community are very likely
| upper castes. see [1] If you are interested to learn more
| about the caste system in india it is recommended to get your
| facts from multiple sources. start from [2]
|
| [1] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674987883 [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India
| btree_001 wrote:
| > only caste that is supposed to be educated
|
| Not True.
|
| The book [1] documents evidences from the revenue records of
| the early British Administration in India on the state of
| education in the late 1700s through the 1800s up until the
| early 1900s. These records show that India had a well
| established grassroots education system at the village level,
| with access to children from all walks of the society
| including female students. The subjects taught included -
| Grammar, Lexicology, Poetry, Drama & Religious History,
| Rhetoric, Mathematics, Astronomy and Astrology, Logic, Law,
| Medical texts etc., As per the records and communication from
| the administrators, almost all villages had access to such
| schools.
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17931651-the-
| beautiful-t...
| hackernewds wrote:
| Not to mention Ramanujan grew up in a colonial British era,
| and to attribute his genius and success (instead of the
| oppression and difficulties) him and his environment
| struggled with due to British colonialism is utterly rich!
|
| Ramanujan succeeded in spite of it, not because of the
| favors of the British. Imagine how many Ramanujans were
| ignored due to 200 years of British colonial rule in India,
| wherein caste system developed and thrived*
| gen_greyface wrote:
| The cited book has no information on how the surveys
| themselves were conducted. The book is an overall
| romanticization of pre-colonial india, and frequently
| indulges in nostalgia.
|
| The following books have a good overview of education&caste
| in india.
|
| A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India
|
| Gail Omvedt, Understanding Caste
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Do these books fix the day issue? How do they do it?
| rramadass wrote:
| Agreed. It is interesting to contrast G.H.Hardy's treatment of
| Ramanujan (nurturing) with Arthur Eddington's treatment of
| Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (petty and back-stabbing) decades
| later. A discussion with lots of links can be found at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41284239
| non_low_key wrote:
| What do you mean by savage "native" here ? He is coming from a
| culture of long and rich intellectual history.
| uncharted9 wrote:
| I think he was referring to the way colonizers commonly
| referred to the subjects of their colonies pejoratively as
| "savage natives". This applies to Native Americans, Africans,
| South Asians, etc. Racism was the norm in the old days.
| rq1 wrote:
| What a kind heart!
| shombaboor wrote:
| exposure and opportunity means so much in professional life.
| There's a lot of value out there but someone has to find and
| promote it.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| The stories of mathematicians like Srinivasa Ramanujan, who
| claimed to have derived complex partitions and identities in
| dreams, have always captivated me. It's as if their minds were
| tapping into some hidden reservoir of knowledge. I'm curious what
| drives these intuitive leaps. Was Ramanujan's brain quietly
| processing patterns during sleep, leveraging its default mode
| network in ways we're still struggling to understand? Or was it
| something more fundamental - an emergent property of complex
| neural networks, perhaps, or even a glimpse into Jung's
| collective unconscious?
|
| I'm curious to hear how others think about this phenomenon. Do
| recent advances in neuroscience, AI, or cognitive psychology
| offer any clues about how innovators like Ramanujan access these
| hidden sources of insight? Or are we still stuck in the realm of
| "genius is mysterious"?
| yas_hmaheshwari wrote:
| I am also intrigued by this question: What was different for
| guys like Ramanujan, and how were they able to tap in to this
| hidden reservoir of knowledge. And how can we replicate it
|
| One guy able to tap into this knowledge in dreams is an
| indication that it is possible. Now, how do we make this the
| default for everyone is the question I wonder about
|
| The way we found one variant of wheat in Mexico that was
| resistant to bacteria, and replicate that to the whole world --
| can we do something like that for humans ( even I don't like
| the sound of it, but I hope you get the feeling )
| profsummergig wrote:
| > The way we found one variant of wheat in Mexico that was
| resistant to bacteria, and replicate that to the whole world
|
| Great analogy.
|
| Borlaug's famous Mexican dwarves.
| gurjeet wrote:
| > > ... found one variant of wheat in Mexico ...
|
| According to the Wikipedia page of Norman Borlaug, he
| _developed_ that variety of wheat.
| wruza wrote:
| _how do we make this the default for everyone is the question
| I wonder about_
|
| You delete stupid prejudices from society, then it allows
| itself to do that. One group of people forcibly practicing it
| for idiotic reasons now plagued the whole field with its
| label, amplified by religious ideas. The irony is, it's that
| same limitation that disallows to address itself and
| continues to propagate.
| fwip wrote:
| We all already do solve problems in our dreams. Even if you
| haven't awoken with a Eureka, surely you've occasionally
| found that something that was difficult to solve yesterday is
| obvious with a pair of fresh eyes.
| paulpauper wrote:
| As the article mentions ,we was familiar with the literature.
| He communicated with other mathematicians, read papers, and
| submitted in journals while in India. he was not some hermit in
| a cave or something. I think this claim that he just dreamed
| the results part of mythology that has been built around him.
| From what I read, he he did a lot of the grunt work deriving
| these formulas but only published the final results, so it only
| appears that he conjured them out of nothing. It's not like he
| could have sent Hardy a book-sized letter of all the steps to
| derive those results.
| mangodrunk wrote:
| This myth of him just coming up with results without all the
| hard studying he did is often repeated. His results are made
| to be seen as impossibly hard and his impact is overstated.
| Galois solved a problem that was open for 350 years, he made
| significant contributions to new branches of math and he died
| at 20. I don't like the whole ranking thing, but with all the
| myths surrounding Ramanujan I feel compelled to say Ramanujan
| is overrated and Galois is by far the more gifted and
| accomplished to just name one person.
| Tier3r wrote:
| Starting from the basics, Ramanujan was known to spend huge
| amounts of time in the library pouring over mathematical texts.
| He was also personally and spiritually obsessed with
| mathematics, thinking it was an expression of divinity. So its
| quite probable a significant chunk of his memories were already
| mathematical and random accesses to it were the same.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| This is the thing. You think about something with compulsion
| for long enough, it shows up in your dreams.
| Lutger wrote:
| People are impressed by the seemingly spontaneous origin of
| genius ideas, but forget all the analytical labor that went
| into preparing the mind for conceiving such thoughts.
| Genius doesn't come out of nowhere. The 'stroke of the
| genius' required a lot of hard work and experience.
|
| And, it works the same with us 'normal' people, even though
| the results are less spectacular. Want to have a good idea?
| You need to feed your brain everything you can and obsess
| over it, then let it stew for a bit. Again, and again. Only
| then do you stand a chance for a really good idea to just
| pop out.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Please forgive, it's *poring
| chandureddyvari wrote:
| There's a relevant quote from Swami Vivekananda on this
|
| From Karma Yoga, Chapter: I, Karma in its effect on character--
|
| What we say a man "knows", should, in strict psychological
| language, be what he "discovers" or "unveils"; what a man
| "learns" is really what he "discovers", by taking the cover off
| his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.
|
| We say Newton discovered gravitation. Was it sitting anywhere
| in a corner waiting for him? It was in his own mind; the time
| came and he found it out. All knowledge that the world has ever
| received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the
| universe is in your own mind. The external world is simply the
| suggestion, the occasion, which sets you to study your own
| mind, but the object of your study is always your own mind. The
| falling of an apple gave the suggestion to Newton, and he
| studied his own mind. He rearranged all the previous links of
| thought in his mind and discovered a new link among them, which
| we call the law of gravitation. It was not in the apple nor in
| anything in the centre of the earth.
|
| Whenever I read about Ramanujan having divine revealing
| formulas in his dreams, I remember Swami Vivekananda's quoute
| on consciousness and mind.
|
| edit: found another relevant quote from Upanishads on tapping
| the infinite knowledge:
|
| Mundaka Upanishad 2.2.9:
|
| "Esa sarvesu bhutesu gudhatmana prakasate, drsyate tvagryaya
| buddhya suksmaya suksmadarsibhih"
|
| Translation: "The Self hidden in all beings does not shine
| forth, but it is seen by subtle seers through their one-pointed
| and subtle intellect."
|
| Explanation: The ultimate knowledge or truth is hidden within
| all beings and is revealed through subtle inner perception. The
| idea is knowledge is latent within the mind, and it is
| discovered, not externally found.
| sss111 wrote:
| That's beautiful, thanks for sharing. I've seen that
| firsthand growing up. It's like when you hear a song as a
| kid, and it just sounds cool. But then, later in life, you
| hear the same song, and it hits you on a whole different
| level--like the meaning was always there, but you had to live
| through stuff to really get it.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| The master appears when the student is ready.
| dsubburam wrote:
| > Translation: "The Self hidden in all beings does not shine
| forth, but it is seen by subtle seers through their one-
| pointed and subtle intellect."
|
| That doesn't look sound to me. If the "seers" are seeing "The
| Self", are they beyond and separate from "The Self"? If they
| do so with their "subtle intellect", is that intellect
| outside of "The Self"?
|
| If affirmative, then "The Self" is something external to the
| seer, making the term a misnomer. And furthermore, there is
| something outside of The Self (that which is seeing The
| Self), which remains to be explicated.
| chandureddyvari wrote:
| I'll try to slightly dive into Advaita philosophy here.
| Both the Upanishads and the Yoga Vasistha affirm that the
| distinction between the seer and the Self is an illusion
| created by the mind. When this illusion is dispelled, the
| oneness of the Self is realized. The intellect, which seems
| to function as a separate tool, is ultimately part of the
| same illusion. True knowledge is realizing that there is no
| separation--everything is the Self.
|
| Quoting one from Katha Upanishad 1.3.10:
|
| "Indriyebhyah para hy artha, arthebhyas ca param manah,
| manasas tu para buddhir buddher atma mahan parah"
|
| Translation: "Beyond the senses are the objects, beyond the
| objects is the mind, beyond the mind is the intellect,
| beyond the intellect is the Self."
|
| This quote emphasizes that the intellect is still a part of
| the illusion. Beyond even the intellect lies the Self,
| which is one and undivided.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Stupid question but why didn't Newton come up with Relativity
| instead?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Likely because it's far more complicated than Newtonian
| gravity and he wouldn't have been aware of the shortcomings
| of his theory e.g. Mercury's orbit. Also, the study of
| light was only just beginning in Newton's era - Ole Romer's
| measurement of the speed of light was in 1676, but
| Maxwell's theories didn't come out until 1865.
| wruza wrote:
| Not sure I follow the explanation. And apologies cause I'm
| not that familiar with these texts, but afaik it talks about
| "soul" here, not information? Words like Brahman, Atman come
| to mind.
|
| In case I mistook it, ignore the above.
|
| _All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from
| the mind_
|
| Doesn't it come from the mind's interaction with the world? I
| don't think that any important knowledge comes from doing
| nothing (apart from psychology due to its nature). It all
| sounds like a typical religious salad, tbh. "You" discover
| from your "mind", but then some seers understand that "you"
| and "all" and "mind" are the same, etc. Well, you don't have
| to be a seer to see it. "You discover from your mind" is a
| useless semantic loop that creates all this unnecessary
| complexity, imo.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| If you spend an enormous amount of time (like, too much)
| working on a single piece of software, you'll come up with
| solutions in your dreams and wake up and write them down. It's
| not _that_ rare. Now... the solutions might be for loops so I
| 'm not comparing such situations to Ramanujan, but it's not
| some extremely rare phenomenon.
| karel-3d wrote:
| As others say - just study a lot of math. You will not be
| Ramanujan, but you will be better at math.
|
| That's not to say there isn't something spiritual and mystical
| in knowledge. I think the fact that he was from a different
| background gave him a different perspective. But yeah you
| cannot skip all the math studying.
| abhaynayar wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_based_on_dreams
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| That's a very interesting article. Thank you!
| bombastry wrote:
| The recent book _Mathematica_ by David Bessis attempts to
| describe this exact topic. One core theme of the book is that
| math is done by building mental models and using our intuitions
| that come from. Formalism is then used to shape and refine
| these models. By spending time developing these models,
| insights eventually become obvious. These mental models are the
| essence of mathematics, not theorems. The author explicitly
| uses neural networks as an example to describe how this
| negative feedback could work to make these changes to our
| mental models happen in our brains.
|
| The core premise of the book is to describe how mathematicians
| work and think and to show that this is a process that everyone
| can do (although some will be better at it than others). It
| includes interesting accounts of Grothendieck, Bill Thurston,
| and Descartes as well as from the author's own research career
| at Yale and Ecole normale superieure. The book is targeted at
| the general reader and at times reads a little like a self-help
| book, especially in the first third or so. However, I found it
| to be an enjoyable and fascinating read. It provoked a lot of
| interesting questions about the nature of learning and provided
| a framework to begin to answer them (e.g. "How can I have
| proved something and yet feel no understanding of it?", "How
| can some people solve problems orders of magnitude faster than
| other smart people, as if they don't even have to think about
| it?", "Why do I sometimes watch a presentation on a new topic,
| follow every step, and come away feeling like I've learned
| nothing?"(* see except below)). I don't think I'm doing it
| justice here, so I'll stop by saying I highly recommend it
| based on your comment.
|
| _______
|
| * I'll use this as an excuse to provide a related excerpt
| featuring Fields Medalist and Abel Prize winner Jean-Pierre
| Serre:
|
| _One day, I had to give a lecture at the Chevalley Seminar, a
| group theory seminar in Paris. I didn 't have substantial new
| results to announce, but it was an opportunity to make a
| presentation even simpler than usual. [...] A couple of minutes
| before the talk was to start, Serre came in and sat in the
| second row. I was honored to have him in the audience, but I
| let him know right off that the presentation might not be very
| interesting to him. It was intended for a general audience and
| I was going to be explaining very basic things._
|
| _What I didn 't tell him, of course, was that his presence was
| intimidating. Still, I didn't want to raise the level of my
| talk only to keep him interested. I just kept an eye out to see
| if he'd taken off his glasses, which would mean he was getting
| bored and had stopped listening. No worries there--he kept his
| glasses on till the end._
|
| _I gave my presentation as I would have without him there,
| speaking to the entire audience, especially the students seated
| in the back, whom I was pleased to see listening and looking
| like they understood. It was a normal presentation, fairly
| successful, not very deep but well prepared, clear, and
| intelligible. At the end of the seminar, Serre came up to me
| and said--and here I quote verbatim: "You'll have to explain
| that to me again, because I didn't understand anything."_
|
| _That 's a true story, and it plunged me into a state of
| profound perplexity._
|
| _Apparently, Serre wasn 't using the verb to understand the
| way most people use it. The concepts and reasonings of my talk
| couldn't really have caused him any difficulty. I'm sure he
| wanted to say that he understood what I had explained, but he
| hadn't understood why what I had explained was true._
|
| _There are two levels of understanding. The first level
| consists of following the reasoning step by step and accepting
| that it 's correct. Accepting is not the same as understanding.
| The second level is real understanding. It requires seeing
| where the reasoning comes from and why it's natural._
|
| _In thinking again about Serre 's comment, I realized that my
| presentation had too many "miracles," too many arbitrary
| choices, too many things that worked without my really knowing
| why. Serre was right; it was incomprehensible. His feedback
| helped me become aware of a number of very big holes in my
| understanding of the objects and situations I was working on at
| the time. In the years that followed, research into
| explanations for these various miracles allowed me to fill in
| some of the holes and achieve some of the most important
| results of my career. (However, some of the miracles remain
| unexplained to this day.)_
|
| _But the most troubling aspect was the abruptness, the
| frankness with which Serre had overplayed his own
| incomprehension._
| dharma1 wrote:
| thanks, will be checking the book!
|
| My intuition is that some people are able to develop
| abstractions on top of abstractions (compression is a key
| part of intelligence) that allow them to traverse the search
| space much, much faster than without these, and with enough
| repetition this becomes routine, even faster in the brain.
|
| I don't think we have a good theory of how this works, or at
| least I haven't come across it.
|
| Neural network guided search is somewhat similar but I think
| we are missing several key pieces
| barcode_feeder wrote:
| "The statements had been proved 20 years earlier by a little-
| known English mathematician named L.J. Rogers... Rogers was
| content to do his research in relative obscurity, play piano,
| garden and apply his spare time to a variety of other pursuits"
|
| divinely inspiring
| jb1991 wrote:
| Indeed. Also is the retirement dream for many working software
| engineers.
| reddit_clone wrote:
| It boggles my mind what could have been if he had lived to a ripe
| old age.
| rramadass wrote:
| For people interested in learning more about Ramanujan and his
| Works;
|
| 1) _Mathematics Wizard Srinivasa Ramanujan : Some glimpses into
| his Life and Work_ by two Indian Mathematicians Narendra Kumar
| Govil and Bhu Dev Sharma is a good biography with an introduction
| to his Mathematics and links to further resources. Good
| complement to Robert Kanigel 's book _The Man Who Knew Infinity_.
|
| 2) In order to understand the fascination that Mathematicians
| have for Ramanujan see this and other lectures by Prof. Ken Ono
| who credits Ramanujan as his inspiration in becoming a
| Mathematician; _Why Does Ramanujan, "The Man Who Knew Infinity,"
| Matter?_ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ynhiZJUMzA
|
| 3) Mathologer on Youtube has good walkthroughs of some of
| Ramanujan's most famous identities (eg. 1+2+3+... = -1/12) -
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mathologer+rama...
|
| 4) All of Ramanujan's published papers and unpublished notebooks
| can be found online at - http://ramanujan.sirinudi.org/
|
| PS: In the submitted article, George Andrews is wearing a
| Ramanujan tie :-)
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| I enjoyed the movie on The Man Who Knew Infinity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity
| rramadass wrote:
| Also see some of Ramanujan biographic documentaries on
| Youtube, specifically;
|
| _The Man Who Loved Numbers - Srinivasa Ramanujan documentary
| (1988)_ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqP2c5xNaTU
|
| _Srinivasa Ramanujan: The Mathematician and His Legacy
| (2016)_ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5jsgBvJMUc
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| Thank you! Really enjoyed the 2nd one. Haven't had the time
| for the 1st one yet.
| gurjeet wrote:
| dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41904553
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Ramanujan responsible for inspiring generations of mathematicians
| throughout the world. His life was a beautiful tragedy. One that
| leaves me in awe and also great inner sadness. If you come from a
| hardcore traditional br*hmin family, just to cross over the ocean
| by boat would risk you getting excommunicated. The culture which
| he came from makes the entire story all the more legendary. Just
| cutting off your topknot and forgoing the dhoti to wear a western
| suit. We don't understand what he went through and what he gave
| up to give us his mathematics. What he had to sacrifice to
| practice his art.. to be.
| utkarsh858 wrote:
| He attributed his success to his family Goddess, claiming he had
| dreams of scrolls unfurling theorems against a bloodied wall.
|
| "An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a
| thought of God" - Ramanujan
| gigatexal wrote:
| I wish we lived in the multiverse where he didn't die. Imagine
| what he could have done. Cool article though.
| jb1991 wrote:
| At least we don't live in the multiverse where he was never
| discovered and all his work was thrown away.
| gigatexal wrote:
| True very true.
| monacobolid wrote:
| > he came up with thousands of elegant and surprising results,
| often without proof. He was fond of saying that his equations had
| been bestowed on him by the gods
|
| And somehow this guy is remembered as a 'genius'...
| rammer wrote:
| Obviously someone's burning
| H4rryp0tt3r wrote:
| I wish Ramanujan's gods gave him a formula to calculate
| ignorance of people!
| Alifatisk wrote:
| There is a movie covering his story, it's incredibly good!
| scotty79 wrote:
| When we get to cloning people he's probably the most worthy
| person to get cloned first. Best chance of getting something
| usefult from a specific genetic makeup. You'd still probably need
| to make hundreds of clones to get one anywhere close to his level
| due to random epigenetics, even if raised in optimal environment
| but it's the best shot.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| The article talks about a recent paper[1] by one of the
| interviewees that uses McMahon partition functions for primality
| testing. I wonder how its running time of compares to that of the
| AKS primality test, and something more practical like BPSW.[2]
| Could it find an application in practical cryptography?
|
| 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06451v2
|
| 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baillie%E2%80%93PSW_primality_...
| debo_ wrote:
| > "This is a very weird fact. It's mysterious," said Shashank
| Kanade of the University of Denver. "I mean, where did the 5 come
| from?"
|
| This is how I felt in 90% of my theoretical math classes in
| university.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| This thread is a good example of one of the perhaps overlooked
| reasons it can be hard to discuss education in our societies -
| any attempt at making a general point, or a meta-observation of
| some kind, quickly gets swallowed in a massive influx of personal
| anecdotes about things that happened to people during their
| education.
|
| Maybe there are other topics where the same phemonen exists. I'm
| not sure if off the top of my head I can think of one where it
| gets so intense so quickly - long, detailed, emotionally charged
| anecdotes immediately when school comes up! [I love a good yarn,
| and am not judging or belittling people for expressing themselves
| here, I must stress].
|
| I have speculated in my comfy armchair as to why our education
| structures seem to make venting such a need for people.
| Anecdotally, there does seem to be a suggestion of some sort of
| lingering and powerful malaise around the whole thing, in any
| case.
|
| I wonder if it's like an abusive relationship - the emotional
| work required to move on and have better relationships (i.e.,
| different educational structures) gets so large at some stage
| that all you can focus on is "coping". And you're sort of stuck,
| and the cycle more or less continues.
|
| EDIT: may I just add - I read that whole article, and am very
| fond of Ramanujan. He made university much harder for me when I
| learned about his existence, as my maths classes seemed so far
| removed from whatever it was he was doing.
| burkaman wrote:
| I think it's just because every single person here has at least
| a decade of personal experience in education. One of the things
| many people like about HN is that when an article about some
| obscure subject is posted, there is often someone in the
| comments with personal experience who can share a story.
| Education is one of the few subjects where we can all be that
| person.
| cassepipe wrote:
| My guess would be it's because it's an experience (most of us)
| have in common in years full of first times. It's also an
| experience that took as least as much space in our life than
| work now does. It's also a place where we had to deal authority
| and groups. So whenever you make any point about education, if
| the point you are making seems to negate/go against the grain
| of my own experience, I will probably tell you :)
|
| (Venting is a need that everyone has when under pressure not
| sure it has anything to do with our education structures)
| sanj wrote:
| Parenting.
| dgfitz wrote:
| This is the long and short of it. Education doesn't replace
| happy, 2-parent homes.
|
| Edit: or happy, one-parent homes. I just have an inkling it
| is good for children to see a contrast of parents, not just
| one parent.
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| I think there is another force at play here - the assumption
| that there is a platonic ideal good education system that works
| at every scale of population.
|
| Attempting to scale something that large forces people into
| boxes that fit inside the framework - one must necessarily
| ignore little detailed differences between humans.
|
| But from the perspective of those individual humans, ignoring
| those little details doesn't really work. Those things are
| important, and tend to ping our egos, so we react accordingly,
| and are eager for opportunities to give voice to this
| frustration.
| everdrive wrote:
| There's another potentially missed point. There is no
| education system, nor any amount of effort which could have
| granted me the genius of Ramanjuan. He had something I never
| will. It would be like dream to run faster than Usain Bolt.
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| On the other hand, it's likely that you have the potential
| to be really good at something that is totally outside your
| awareness right now, and having a broad education can be
| beneficial to expanding your exposure to such possibility.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Trama mostly.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Trauma-drama? :)
| vladimirralev wrote:
| > massive influx of personal anecdotes
|
| a.k.a. sampling from the distribution of interest. Once you
| have enough anecdotes, you actually have a representative
| distribution of the real thing. Selection may be biased but you
| can weight those data points as you like, it's still good data.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| Except for the fact that anecdotes aren't a random sample,
| they're selected because they're interesting.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > as to why our education structures seem to make venting such
| a need for people. Anecdotally, there does seem to be a
| suggestion of some sort of lingering and powerful malaise
| around the whole thing, in any case.
|
| Teaching has not incorporated morality or ethics as strongly as
| some other professions where the need is more obvious. This is
| combined with the way teaching "quality" is measured. The
| result is that your average school teacher often uses tactics
| and methodologies that border on straight up public bullying of
| their students in order to "achieve results."
|
| > I wonder if it's like an abusive relationship
|
| Neither the teacher or the student engage in a process which
| selects each other nor is there any process to manage
| particularly bad combinations of such. They are assigned to and
| stuck with each other. The ethical failures in teaching abound.
| hilux wrote:
| > ... in a massive influx of personal anecdotes ...
|
| Not sure if you're in the US.
|
| Here, ALL non-technical topics, e.g. nutrition, healthcare,
| immigration are just a few of the big ones, devolve into a
| discussion of anecdotes and "feelings."
| boringg wrote:
| I mean everyone on this thread seems to be pointing to the
| negative. I would like to point out that what we have achieved
| from a civilization perspective is literally through education
| and the structures that we have have gotten us this far. It is
| a broad tool and could be better. However lets not throw the
| baby out with the bath water because of all these anecdotes. It
| feels a little like everyone complaining about capitalism for
| all the woes in the world.
|
| Maybe it's worth a bit of perspective.
| dxbydt wrote:
| > it can be hard to discuss education in our societies
|
| I found it quite ironical how the whole topic has been hijacked
| into this side discussion. For the record, Ramanujan is NOT a
| product of the Indian education system. In fact, that system
| was quite cruel & off-putting to him. He was a self-taught math
| prodigy. Apart from the well known 2 big biopics, there are
| numerous TV soaps telecasted in India in various languages that
| regularly emphasize this point. He taught himself mostly using
| Inequalities by GH Hardy, & several other books, all of which
| are freely available right now at the click of a button. Nobody
| is stopping anybody from studying math, and education or the
| lack of it has nothing to do with any of this.
| philiplu wrote:
| > I found it quite ironical how the whole topic has been
| hijacked into this side discussion
|
| Indeed. I submitted this post, because I found the article's
| discussion of the math involved fascinating, along with
| biographical details of Ramanujan I hadn't heard about
| before. I'm surprised to see how popular the post is, but
| also that there's maybe 5 or so posts that engage with the
| actual mathematics.
|
| I probably shouldn't be surprised - generating functions
| pointing out unexpected connections between different
| restricted integer partitions is pretty niche.
| achenet wrote:
| Mourtada was a professor of mine during undergrad. Really happy
| to see him in this article ^_^
| steelframe wrote:
| My education prepared me to make millions of dollars by the time
| I was in my mid-forties. I learned that if I take every task
| seriously and strive to do the absolute best I can on that task,
| no exceptions, regardless of how I personally felt about a
| subject or an assignment, I would end up being an employee that
| saw to it that anything I did, I did to the absolute best of my
| ability.
|
| Not every task ended up being worth doing, but some sure did. And
| regardless, more important than any one individual tasks, I
| earned a reputation with management. This in turn resulted in a
| steady stream of bonuses, stock grants, and promotions. I suppose
| I was doubly-fortunate to have focused my efforts in the tech
| industry from the early 90's onward. You have to be really
| unlucky for nose-to-the-grindstone efforts in FAANG companies to
| not work out pretty well for you from 2003-ish until today.
|
| With continued good health I can look forward to another 20 or 30
| years of life, where I get to do whatever I want with my time
| because I earned so much money being content to conform to
| whatever my employers required of me. Nobody will remember my
| name, but that's okay with me, because I won't either.
| racl101 wrote:
| That's cool!
| uptownfunk wrote:
| This is like looking at the kids who collect Pokemon cards out
| of the sheer love of the Pokemon and playing the game compared
| to the scalpers and "investors" / "speculators". Yes they may
| end up with a lot of money but they will always lack that
| sweetness, purity, and wholesome joy that you see when a kid
| finds and enjoys something.
| runamuck wrote:
| > Hardy, a mathematical giant in his own right, is said to have
| quipped that his greatest contribution to mathematics was the
| discovery of Ramanujan.
|
| I love the Humility and Kindness in Hardy's statement.
| arkj wrote:
| I don't understand why people praise Ramanuja so much. Why not
| this praise for Euler or Gauss?
| airstrike wrote:
| I have no idea how you could possibly have picked up the notion
| that Euler and Gauss are not praised enough. They are literally
| the top two names when you google "greatest mathematicians all
| time"
|
| https://i.imgur.com/AzL6hVQ.png
| uptownfunk wrote:
| There is something cult like, mystic, almost magical about
| Ramanujan that almost transcends the raw intellectual
| horsepower (which he certainly had).
| xoxxala wrote:
| Interesting. My experience with maths education is pretty much
| limited to watching Numberphile and other YT videos these days,
| but Euler and Gauss get plenty of praise.
| fragmede wrote:
| There is such praise, just not on this post, but what's
| powerful about the story of Ramanuja is where he came from. The
| almost-miss that the world would not have his genius, but for a
| couple of lucky turns, is a powerful driving story about a
| diamond in the rough. I'm no such a genius, but the idea of
| being discovered is very alluring; to idly fantasize that I
| have some gift that could lead me to fame and riches. It's that
| nice feeling to hold while reading and thinking about his
| story.
| kwar13 wrote:
| I cannot recommend reading A Mathematician's Apology enough. It
| was written by GH Hardy and I think it's one of the best non-math
| texts out there to understand how a mathematician's brain works.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Apology
|
| Fairly short and beautifully written.
| dharma1 wrote:
| I often think about Ramanujan in the context of AI, if reasoning
| is type 2 thinking how did he (apparently) come across a lot of
| his ideas as intuitions
| chucknthem wrote:
| I wonder if you can train a neuronetwork to have the kind of
| intuition Ramanujan had. How incredible would it be for math
| discoveries. Then separate AIs to try and prove or disprove the
| insights.
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