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Comment by alx__ | Hacker News Reader

Been reading Chuck Klosterman's book, But What If We're Wrong?. Which is partly that thought. The things that get remembered in the global consciousness are not always the people or things we'd expect. It's possible that we have a "genius" right now that will be remembered in 100 years. But due to all the local noise it's hard to see through that and remain objective.

Basically we're really terrible at guessing what the future holds.

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I would argue that is actually the norm. The more I dig deeper into the history of any field the more I realize how many publicly unknown geniuses there are. Mostly only recognized and praised as such by the connoisseurs of the respective field.

And it makes sense, especially in our times, sophisticated PR (and Einstein enjoyed that, too, in addition in being a genius) just trumps any recognition one might get in a life time, in the short term that is.

If you are not seeking some grandiose recognition (like Newton or Edison, famously) you are potentially a better explorer of the yet Unknown not bothering wasting any energy and being less corruptable by discoveries, you are happy to share with others and helping to bring about.

Off the top of my head: Three examples of rather unknown "geniuses" in physics in no particular order:

Chien-Shiung Wu, Oliver Heaviside, John Michell

One could also argue, as I sometimes do, too, that a genius is just a convenient narrative device in order to highlight and illustrate some important turning point with the historical person serving as some responsible "actor" in bridging over an otherwise complex and often self-contradictory development into a tangible coherent state.

I think there isn't enough distinction in the term "genius". How do you even compare their contributions? It is easy when you have someone like Euclid or Newton, who's work is taught in pre-college grades. Who is the last person to have an impact on pre-collegiate math syllabi? It's been centuries. Then you look at someone like Einstein who was discussed in every major magazine and newspaper at the time his general theory was articulated. I think Hawking got the similar treatment, but has he impacted what is taught in 4-year college the way Einstein did? I think Hawking's genius is too esoteric.

There needs to be a new term. "Genius" is too limp to describe individuals who radically alter the curriculum taught to undergraduate students.

> Who is the last person to have an impact on pre-collegiate math syllabi?

Shrodinger, maybe? He is a really large part of the reason people study matrices before college, and then go and complain because nobody can show them a use for the thing.

Showing a use case for matrices is extremely easy : 3D graphics. At least 50% of school students will have a good understanding of that field.

Yes, matrices got everywhere in the 20th century. There is basically no field that doesn't use them nowadays.

But any demonstration requires modern knowledge, and matrices are one of the very few modern thing students see. If you want to show them 3D graphics, you will need to teach programing first. Yeah, some will know it by them, but schools also can't rely on that.

(As an aside, chemistry also has some weirdly modern knowledge on its curriculum. Also out of context, just thrown in there because it's important.)

The nearest application I can think of is for modeling stochastic processes, but students see so little statistics that I imagine that will only change the object on the "why am I even studying X?" complaint.

You don't have to teach programming to teach computer graphics at the level of pedagogical example. The programming is bookkeeping for assets and occasionally a clever optimization(e.g. a Bresenham line rasterization, instead of one done by linear interpolation); the algorithms that are most critical to understanding graphics are often one-liners and analytic in nature, and so can directly reflect the underlying mathematics.

The kind of example you would get for matrix math would be something like: "Here is a triangle described by these points, here is a matrix that projects them in a 3D camera. In such-and-such 3D library, points are projected with the matrix by doing these steps. Compute and plot the result of applying the matrix to each point." And then in successive examples you can add some details about how you go about building up the matrix by computing the camera, translating the poly and so forth, and make comparisons to how it can be done in some scenarios using only trigonometry, and further comparisons to camera lenses and artist's 3D projection with horizon and vanishing points. If you put all those connections there in one place, you have the starting point, and then it can be elaborated on into both the pure math topics(why does this mathematical representation work) and the computing topics(how do I automate the process of plotting points).

What tends to happen is that the text doesn't allow enough of a detour to make all of those connections, so you instead get an extraordinarily brief allusion to application in a single word problem, after a completely abstract introduction.

This is a well studied phenomenon in literature. Some books we regard as classics today sold relatively little upon release, while authors in the past were incredibly popular then, upon the author's death usually, the name was utterly forgotten from aesthetic appraisals. Ideas of a "canon" are much less stable than people think.

Even when it comes to philosophy I think it holds true. Up into the 1930s Bergson was regarded as one of the most important philosophers in Europe while Wittgenstein was barely mentioned outside a few, select circles, even he had already published his Tractatus. Nowadays Bergson returns blank stares when you mention his name to an Anglo audience while Wittgenstein is seen as one of the most important philosophers of the last few hundred years.

Which is profoundly sad since Wittgenstein is only saved by his prophetic beliefs about language - despite writing like a post-modernist while somehow being considered part of the "analytic tradition"...

He is fashionable nonsense.

Funny, I thought his musics about "language games" was the part of his output more amenable to fashionable nonsense. I have met very few students who attempt to say anything about Tractatus, but quite many who espouse deep-sounding platitudes about "language is a game".

Have you read the Tractatus? After Frege, and Russell, it's difficult to think of a philosopher who contributed more to the analytic style of exposition.

There is some irony in dismissing him as "nonsensical", because he himself suggested the Tractatus was "nonsense". The point of writing it was to demonstrate that philosophy in his time (e.g. the logical atomism of Russell) had gone astray.

Art, as well; Van Gogh died a failure.

Art's a little weird, because the price of a lot of million-dollar art pieces is driven in large part by the need for an appreciating-on-paper vehicle for tax evasion. (That you can lend out to art galleries.)

And the last thing these schemes need is a living artist who can - upon his work reaching stardom - simply make more of it.

In this respect, dead poets are much safer to bet the farm on.

A good example of this is the Author of the famously "bad line", "It was a dark and stormy night" was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was perhaps one of the most famous authors of his time, who also coined many very common expressions we use today.

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