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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

Seems to not be surprising? Prodigies be prodigies, like him and T.Tao, while the rest of us compete out our own mostly insignificant games..

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T.Tao's first publication (at least the first one that shows up on MathSciNet) was in 1996, the same year he finished his mathematics PhD. I would say for most people working towards the pure side of mathematics, having over 5 papers before the end of a PhD is not at all typical.

Terence Tao finished his PhD at age 21. So he both didn't publish major work before PhD, but did publish major work at a young age. Most math PhDs including OP topic Lichtman would start after age 20 and finish at age 24-28.

So Lichtman might be on a similar trajectory as Tao, but not accelerated through formal schooling.

And since Lichtman's work is in elementary number theory (similar to combinatorics, one of Tao's main subjects), it's more accessible to early results from a brilliant person with less experience. Other subjects require more background study before reaching new territory.

People on this thread say that in recent years there has been a lot of pressure for math researchers to publish far more often partial / lower quality work to match the publication rate of other fields.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/48399/how-many-...

No kidding. I admire people who decide to pursue math or physics without that edge. So much easier to jump into engineering or medicine.

I’d argue all research is the same, or at least should be. I left academia after my PhD because I realized it’s meant for prodigies, not regular people like me. I had to leave even though my advisors tried to convince me that I’d have the best shot of all their trainees at being a good professor. I think I held what is needed of a good professor at an even higher standard.

There's a lot more luck though involved in certain fields. In modern biology it's not really possible to have a "prodigy" career trajectory IMO - studies cost too much time and money for even the best 3rd year PhD student to be shocking the world and churning out dozens of pubs.

And there is a need for many "normal" people to contribute to research in the field too, because a solid part of the equation is sheer man hours. I get being jaded, and I also don't know what field you were in, but regardless I think it's a bit too pessimistic to assume that only prodigies can meaningfully contribute to research.

"Research is for prodigies" is extremely specific to (mostly pure) math and theoretical physics, where the results aren't practical so no one cares much about easy problems. Math students solve professor-made-problems for fun and games during school (IMO, Putnam), and rarely does anyone academically publishes the results. (Maybe one big book of 1+ years of problems).

In other more practical fields, less,-inspired research is useful, and also research is slower due to real world complexity and expense, not inherent intellectual difficulty. Like plowing through all possible chemical rejection looking for one that works, or fine tuning a radio in engineering, or a NN or a big program in CS, or running psych / sociology surveys.

It’s very surprising. How many papers do you think Terence Tao had published by the third year of his PhD?

There’s not only one metric for a genius, this dudes more prolific With his papers, maybe he’s even more of a prodigy than Tao, but what difference does it make, does it make Tao any less of a big deal?

Terence Tao was already a full professor at age 24, younger than when almost every math PhD was in their 3rd year of PhD.

I am the foremost expert on all of these topics, within the four walls of this office. Don't take that from me.

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