Hacker News Reader

Comment by j7ake | Hacker News Reader

Saying Terence Tao is a math prof at UCLA is like saying John Carmack is a programmer at Keen Technologies.

If you're going for a PhD or researching some obscure, furthest reach study of some mathematical principle and you get stuck. One of the ways to move forward is to hope that Terence Tao finds your topic interesting and can give you a few minutes of his time - because he'll probably have some ideas for moving your research forward.

Conversely, there’s a running joke that you’re in big trouble if Terry Tao takes too much of an interest in your topic of study, since he will inevitably solve all but the hardest problems in the field.

I got stuck solving a polynomial equation system for years

Perhaps I should try sending him a mail

So that's an excuse for such a low context post?

Yes. Not knowing who Terry Tao is,, if you're on HN, makes you an outlier.

Hi, it's me, I'm the outlier, it's me

Welcome! You now know who Terence Tao is :)

Not any more

Congratulations! You're one of today's lucky 10,000.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

For the HN crowd, explaining who Terrence Tao is would be ike explaining who Obama is

I am sure 100% of thornewolf and 99% of people reading the same news as you know who Terence Tao is, but extrapolating from your own perspective is treacherous.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

https://xkcd.com/2501

This may be hard to believe, but a lot of us here in "the HN crowd" have zero interest in celebrity and do not keep a catalog of them all in our heads. Even intellectual ones. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's also just its own interest one or may not have.

People approach things in a lot of different ways and it would be nice if we can just respect that instead of digging on each other or making unfounded assumptions.

I don't have much interest in celebrity either, but I feel that you're short-changing Terence Tao. He's not really famous due to being celebrated, but he's celebrated due to his level of skill and breadth of mathematical knowledge (sometimes known as the Mozart of Mathematics).

I think your sentiment is misplaced as I would expect HN commenters to have heard of Tao as he often features in posts about mathematics. I'm sure I recall seeing some comments from him too.

There's an approachable Numberphile video featuring him here: https://www.numberphile.com/videos/the-worlds-best-mathemati...

I started to agree with you, but let's keep in mind that there are new generations of tech geeks out here who are just learning about the things we live and breathe.

You can't expect the entire Internet to always provide enough context for you personally, with your exact level of knowledge, to understand a social media post with no additional effort. How do you expect that to work at scale? Meanwhile, Google is just a tab away.

Lack of culture on your part?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com