Lessons I wish I had been Taught | Hacker News Reader

Lessons I wish I had been Taught

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227 pointswickedchicken20 comments

Some excellent points even for a non-maths guy like me. And I learned a new word: incunabulum.

Rota's reflections, anecdotes, and musings are always a good read. I enjoyed his book of essays (with Jacob Schwartz and Mark Kac) "Discrete Thoughts"

http://books.google.com/books?id=5waLQ06J9VwC&pg=PA1&...

and I see he has another called "Indiscrete Thoughts".

Point 5 reminds me of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiation_under_the_integ...

He was a fine professor, and these notes captured his attitude in the lecture hall pretty well.

Uh, isn't citing papers that have nothing to do with your paper unethical or plagiarism and could be seen as padding your paper? I don't think citing sources that have nothing to do with your paper is a good idea...

Not really. Plagiarism means something else, and padding your paper or citing some random guy doesn't help you in any way. (A lot of work is done to shorten papers to get them under journals' page limit, and many have at least a full page of citations.) And he only did it once; if nothing else, he can plausibly say "I had these papers on my desk, had a deadline, and wanted to make sure I wasn't accidentally using their work without giving credit".

[I'm doing a PhD in crypto after my MSc in math, my girlfriend is doing her PhD in math, lots of friends are mathematicians.]

It's more like anti-plagiarism: giving credit where none is due.

This was my first thought as well, but from the context I think that he was citing papers that were related (even if indirectly) to his work.

Loved this:

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: "How did he do it? He must be a genius!"

In Brazil there is a saying, "água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura", which means something like "Soft water on hard rock will eventually poke holes in it", but it sounds way less folksy than the original.

Sounds a lot like Grothendieck's metaphor of the rising sea. pdf warning: http://www.math.jussieu.fr/~leila/grothendieckcircle/mclarty...

Unusually, the German version is much more concise:

Stetes Wasser höhlt den Stein.

My apologies, but I can't resist playing with national stereotypes:

German vs. Brazilian (Portuguese)

I think the best English approximation of the German version is: Steady water drills the stone.

First we see that the German at once describes and commands the actions: "drills". There is no time measure here, the point is the damn rock's getting drilled and that's that.

In Brazilian/Portuguese the talk is of eventually. As in, sure it's inevitable but the stone and the water will have a lot of time together, they will change over time.

Next we can observe that while Portuguese/Brazilian provides details, like many holes, the German is light on flowery detail, one hole, many holes, not relevant to the pain point, which is: rock->drilled rock.

Lastly we can see the German implies the stone is hard, hard is the default nature of all things in Germany, especially stones.

The Portuguese/Brazilian on the other hand specifically qualifies the stone as hard, presumably because Brazil is filled with soft stones, gently dancing under the feet of girls in Ipanema.

Made me smile... or would have, if I wasn't a German Very Serious Person. ;)

I don't think "drill" is such a good translation though. Höhlen comes from "Höhle", meaning "cave". Maybe a better translation:

Steady water hollows the stone.

And you got to admit that the "German assumption of hardness" is actually pretty accurate when it comes to stones! (Except those in Brazil, presumably.)

Lesson #1: Which words in a sentence need to be capitalized.

I figured out most of these aspects of the academic game before I bomed out of it.

Yeah, academia... never was a fan.

A couple gems for life though, the bit about old age stuck out to me. I've learned that from my dad, who attests to having never thought about getting old and now spends lonely nights drinking himself to bed. Pretty depressing but very little anyone can do about it... Just know you're going to get old one day, you're going to die, and then get over it.

I am unfamiliar with the verb "to bome".

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bome "Verb, " I just Bomed that math test!" (Meaning you did a good job)"

Although based on context, I'd guess a misspelt "bombed"?

I think "bowed" is far more likely.

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