Lessons I wish I had been taught (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Lessons I wish I had been taught (1996)

alumni.media.mit.edu

136 pointshargup20 comments

I have a colleague who gives great talks. There are three reasons they are great. (1) The science is great. (2) He speaks engagingly and explains his (complex) material very well.(3) He always includes a citation and some very specific remarks on the single paper that I can read, to learn more. This third thing is the most important to the growth of the academic field, because solitary study is usually required to make progress, and nobody has time to read dozens of papers in a field that is not quite their own.

"An audience is like a herd of cows, moving slowly in the direction they are being driven towards. If we make one point, we have a good chance that the audience will take the right direction; if we make several points, then the cows will scatter all over the field."

Then proceeds to make several points. Good stuff, though. Rule, exception, moo.

He was talking about a lecture. A webpage in this form is a static entity that you can go to and come back from multiple times and leave with as many thoughts.

The Feynman method is a nice hack. Good mental model.

I found number 10 (old age) interesting in that I'm approaching it, hehe. I understood what he wrote for the most part, but could have used a bit more exposition. Anyone want to try describing it, perhaps from another angle?

> Every mathematician has only a few tricks

Can anyone in the know illuminate this with some examples?

My favorite complex analysis book makes repeated use of the same infinite sum throughout. He's probably referring to such things as well as logical tactics. There are even books written on this sort of thing. I think you can find them as "tactics for problem solving" or some such.

This was brilliant. Thanks for (re)posting it.

I had never heard of Rota before. I'll have to read more about him. It's a bit sad that he lived for only a couple years after this lecture, dying at the relatively young age of 66. (Wikipedia)

Rota was quite the celebrity, at least among students. In addition to advanced classes in his specialty, he taught differential equations, which was required for at least two thirds of undergraduates, so everyone knew him. Each semester he would pay a diffeq student to have a can of Coke ready for him at each class, so he could drink it while he lectured. Also, anyone who asked a question during lecture (a room of ~350 people) would get a free Hershey's bar after class. That he had worked in (and sometimes taught) philosophy as well as math was kind of the icing on the cake.

There was also a persistent rumor that he'd once given a diffeq multiple choice exam (scored like the SAT, so that a fraction of a point was deducted for every wrong answer) on which the average score was 1 or 2 percent, ie simply handing in a blank exam would probably have given a passing score. But I never confirmed that.

Speaking of Rota and differential equations, he also wrote a rant about the terrible state of teaching differential equations [0].

[0] https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf

Very odd to see this here. I had recently been Googling the writings of the late professor. He as a few lists like this out there.

>Everyone in the audience has come to listen to your lecture with the secret hope of hearing their work mentioned.

People are narcissistic as hell.

Do you like it when I reply to your comment, thereby indicating that I read it, and by replying I further show that it was more important to me than many other comments I didn't reply to?

That's what you were hoping for when you wrote your reply, didn't you?

:-)

Surely your comment only works if you're 'famous' on HN.

So you think people comment and don't care if nobody ever responds to them? That they don't like getting reactions (not counting the negative ones - which of course according to you nobody cares about either, unless you are "famous" - because for some inexplicable reason(ing) only famous people like positive and fear negative responses)?

No, people do like get a response as you suggest.

I was trying to suggest as an analogue of the situation in the OP, that was being satirically commented on, that in order to properly mirror the situation your comment would need to come from someone with renown in the current locus. If people are really listening to the lecture hoping to be namechecked then it would be because they consider the lecturer to be a worthy in some way, surely?

The link points to the middle of the article.

It's because it's been submitted before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220746

Yes, but if you're trying to get around the duplicate detector, you can usually just append a query string like '?2'. Or, if the server tries to interpret query strings and that would be bad, it'd be friendlier to the read to instead use a non-existent div like '#2'. Bypasses the duplicate detector, specifies how many resubmissions, and doesn't jump the reader somewhere in the article. (Although I should note that I think the one OP chose is one of the two best ones, so no real harm done.)

We fixed that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com