He dropped out to become a poet – now he’s won a Fields Medal (2022)
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
Although I don’t think a field medalist would waste his time with an untalented youth. He obviously saw something.
Ugh. Do you think a Fields medalist would "waste" his time cleaning his bedroom? Folding his clothes?
1. The world is much more menial than you think it is.
2. Fields medalists are, unsurprisingly, human beings, and keep doing human stuff like making new friends just for fun.
3. Not everyone is living under the weird delusion/obsession where all outcomes have to be maximally favorable for "life to be worth it". Not all companies have to be billion dollar companies. Not all students have to go and win Fields medals.
4. The "untalented youth" is much more interesting than what you give them credit for.
"Formal education" is just industrialized mentoring and compelled hard work. Dropouts and "uneducated" people built the world. If you work hard and have good mentors, you can do anything, whether it's in a school or not.
(While I am vehemently opposed to the modern method of education, I don't think that formal education in a classroom setting is inherently bad, nor do I think most people today have the social support, intellect, or temperament necessary to drop out and still be successful.)
1. effort, usually from youth, that nobody knows about so it appears to be innate
2. the effort is motivated and guided by some mentor(s), usually people with serious qualifications, like your Fields medalist uncle deciding to take you under his wing, after you said "math is fun :D" one time at 7 years old when he told you his job was "to do math :)" upon you asking him as children like to do, and turn you into a Fields-winning adult
This reminds me of those people who pretend they're a genius because they can guess the day of the week if you give them a date, when the reality is that anybody can learn to do that because it's just an algorithm[1] that you can calculate in your head and practice to the point that you come off as if you have a photographic memory or something.
I think we overvalue the uniqueness of the individual in this hero worship of the lonely genius, as if a flower is independent of the earth from which it grows.
But then again, it's true that there are exceptional stars, singular phenomena that cannot be explained by the sum of its parts. I suppose that leap, the surprising distance between what was given and what the individual made of it, is what we call genius, talent, luck or hard work.
We can see common evidence of this in how every person we know differs in their general abilities across different problem areas.
But we are so used to that we are probably under aware of how differently we may all think.
Potential geniuses would be people whose internal abstractions are uncommon and happen to fit important under-solved problem areas.
If their uncommon insights are paired with healthy brain biology, a drive to identify and solve interesting problems, and some luck, we get a genius.
It's more obvious in athletics, where there is clearly natural talent, but the equalizer is the support network of parents funding practice, driving to games, getting into competitive leagues, etc. I don't see why the same wouldn't apply to intellectual talents as well, even if the differences in natural talent are less obvious than in athletics.
> Soon after finishing college, I had the good fortune to meet Professor Heisuke Hironaka
[1] https://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Prizes/Fields/2022/H...
There's a lot of liberties taken by the pseudo biographical articles, especially when they're dealing with the gee whiz genius trope in American media which is really annoying.
It's really just anti-intellectualisn cloaked to something else.
"Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician."
I’m a bit cautious about this because it’s presented as “he is said to have remarked…”, but cutting people down - especially students - to make some other point is unnecessary and not ideal.
not that I particularly like Hilbert, he gives me a bad vibe because:
how do I forgive shitty professors who have refused to help me? how do I let go of the fact they are awful people from a different era? How do I refuse to undergo the rituals which teach things I whish to not learn (certain attitudes) while at the same time making it through those same rituals I reject?
and it turns out the professor I speak of IS on D. Hilbert's lineage!
This kind of militant snobbery for pure math is common with the greats and shouldn’t be taken personally.
I think it also shouldn't always be taken so seriously. In my experience, mathematicians (both applied and pure) tend to have a sense of humour about this sort of thing, and I see no reason to doubt that that wouldn't have applied to at least some of the greats as well.
Joking or ironic or not it can still be harmful.
Neither of them genuinely dislikes the other's field/passion, they're actually very appreciative of each other's skills. It's just a very common kind of humor.
Women like R.O have contributed to all those fields since the 1980s .. but then they've been surrounded by others like C.P to take the edge off the boof heads.
https://www.science.org.au/profile/robyn-owens
https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/persons/cheryl-pra...
Whenever i read something like this, I marvel at the author who can be both fluent in Mathematics and have an ability to convey very complex ideas to a lay reader.
Guess who paid for the article you just read? James Simons, a "money chaser".
Are you sure the Wall Street guys are better paid?
Prior: URGENT
Re: [Article Attached]
For those who recall the Regents' recent decision to cut humanities yet again, there will be a special Departmental Curriculum Committee meeting at 4pm on Monday. Meeting Subject - developing and offering new courses for both seniors and graduate students in Mathematics. Starting this Fall term.
- Sonata Wordwright, Departmental Assistant Dean of Humanities for Poetry
"In fact for most of his life his day, at least during the cricket season, would consist of breakfast during which he read The Times studying the cricket scores with great interest. After breakfast he would work on his own mathematical researches from 9 o'clock till 1 o'clock. Then, after a light lunch, he would walk down to the university cricket ground to watch a game. In the late afternoon he would walk slowly back to his rooms in College. There he took dinner, which he followed with a glass of wine. When cricket was not in season, it was the Australian cricket scores he would read in The Times and he would play real tennis in the afternoons."
He dropped out to become a poet – now he’s won a Fields Medal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31985400 - July 2022 (136 comments)
Kinda suspicious, if you ask me. These are probably not his notes, but more like a publication and he doesn't want to use modern tools.
Become a poet. Now he's
Won a Fields Medal.