Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39764954 - March 2024 (48 comments)
> “I’m not able to learn mathematics easily,” Talagrand tells ... “I have to work. It takes a very long time and I have a terrible memory. I forget things. So I try to work, despite handicaps, and the way I worked was trying to understand really well the simple things. Really, really well, in complete detail. And that turned out to be a successful approach.”
Just imagine. You may be super smart who gets things easily and right away. Or, you may be average. Using this philosophy in life, one can excel further.
But! When he finally learned something new, he would never forget it. He would remember it in details, both the whys and the hows. I've always admired his skill.
The (US) academic system is not set up to accommodate anyone, really. It's designed to get someone just below average through their standardized testing and not much more. If you don't fit that mold you're shit outta luck. You either suffer through it like "normal" people, or you find it utterly intolerable and fail or drop out.
Personally, I learn best backwards from everyone else. Building up very slowly from fundamentals and basically starting over with basic algebra every semester is actual hell. I need to see the goal concept fully formed and functional, and then work backwards to derive the fundamentals I'm missing.
Generally speaking, once I understand a concept I have it forever. I usually only need the briefest of refresher on mechanics and formulae as I use them. Spending the first month of calculus class going over 9th grade algebra is an unbelievable waste of my time.
My final attempt at college was a CS degree. I made it through one semester and did not even get to a single CS concept. It was at least a year and a half of bullshit prerequisites that I had to pay for. I dropped out when I had to write a presentation to the board of my hypothetical company on the benefits of upgrading their printers. I'm not kidding. I paid real money for this.
I've totally given up on the educational system. I don't fit into the cookie cutter ideal of the average idiot grinding out a degree. I just can't do it.
I think probably the ideal way for me to learn is to spend a lot of time one on one with a domain expert that can show me the final concept and work backwards with me to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. I don't want or need, nor can I tolerate spending time going over things I already know for the 30th time. I need to learn the things I don't know. School just doesn't work that way.
And I understand that there are great teachers out there and an LLM cannot replace that, but at the same time there are a lot of bad teachers wasting everybody's time.
I think that almost everyone would benefit enormously from having a focused and dedicated one-on-one tutor. Just imagine if you could call up the leading world expert in any field at any time to ask any question you could possibly have. We as a species would get so much more done.
At least that's what I want AI to be in the next decade or so. A tool to push humans to a much higher potential where we can solve our own problems more effectively. I'm afraid we'll skip that step, though and go straight to worshiping the AI that makes the most paperclips.
Anyway, I'm still experimenting off and on with local LLMs to get me closer to where I want to be. I'm not sure it's much faster to use an LLM and continually verify its output, but it does at least provide structure and guidance for my own self-teaching.
Same, and at work too. I think it's because we think big picture and conceptually. Tell me the outline, and I'll seek out missing information and fill in puzzle pieces, until I can grok it. It's a slow process but learning from first principles I find absolutely boring and unengaging.
I found math in high school utterly meaningless, a set of drills and exercises to do again and again without explanation.
If you go to the gym and you want to do some exercises, you'll generally get a list and try to learn them correctly.
If math teachers taught sports, no one would ever do anything because they would never understand what the goal was. What's the end result? The complex end result should be made known so that we know why we're doing something.
With math it's, shut up and do your drills and if you don't you'll be punished with bad grades. See that guy in the corner with his head down and protractor? He loves it, be like him.
After failing out of college I went out to the valley and was very successful. I went back to college in my late 20’s using a loop hole to transfer into a top CS school. I knew myself better now and studied all the time knowing I wasn’t stupid just learned differently. On things that weren’t yet clicking I would relentlessly keep studying it and practicing and trying until it did. I graduated highest in my class at a top public engineering program - which gives gentleman F’s to 70% of original freshmen unlike private schools.
My daughter is the same way, so I found a private school that is very careful about differentiating learners and letting them move their own pace. I was suicidally depressed about public education growing up as it ground me down for being different. She is thriving at the stages I fell off the rails.
Years later, I went back and got my MS online. That was incredible. Recorded lectures meant I could pause and rewind when I lost focus. I really enjoyed my classes because now the most stressful part of it was no longer an issue.
It’s incredible our entire public school system is based on the assumption every student learns things in the same way at the same rate.
Some public schools try to do differentiation but it’s really expensive and impractical at scale. The quality of teacher, resources, and teacher training required if very high. I think every effort to try is worth doing, but the more you try without increasing the amount of funding, training, and selectivity in teacher hiring (which is impractical given the scarcity of high quality teachers relative to the population size) the worse you do for everyone.
I don’t agree vouchers and school choice helps this fwiw. The issues don’t go away by diffusing administration of schools to more organizations, you just end up spending a lot more tax payer money on a lot more administrative staff at a lot more schools with a lot less focus on that center of mass outcome.
The reality is despite how intolerable my childhood was I found my way - and I know many who do. People are resilient and overcome adversity all the time in many shapes.
One of his Hall of Fame players said that he woukd begin with "Gentlemen, this is a football"
With math it's what exactly?
If someone worked backwards from code on DAY 1 of high school math, I'd have been engaged... Instead it was mindless repetitive drills. Later as an advanced thing they'd ask you a real-world question: "Let's say you wanted to circumnavigate the Earth and you started here and had to blah blah". I think they should start and not end with that type of thing.
It's not the same, I know, but to remember things you have to establish and remember entire trains of thought. Not just remember individual milestones.
Are there any quality print magazines like it? I used to get Physics World a long time ago and have been looking for something in print to scratch that same itch.
Something something effective altruism.
It doesn't even need to be altruistic. One would expect that out of sheer self-interest, one would look into propelling humanity forward by elevating and liberating as many people as possible, enabling the brightest of our species to solve the hardest problems and elevate humanity. Though accepting that one needs others to solve problems one does not understand, that they play a supporting role, takes a great deal of humility.
My comment was mostly calling out the hypocrisy of some EAs, Long-termists, and the likes. It points out the myopic, self-centered, irrational, and too self-important view, the often exhibited messiah complex, and of course the absence of humility.
(I also only started to enjoy math, when I could apply it with programming, before it was not traumatic, but mostly boring, but we also did not cover any fun parts like Mandelbrot etc)
There must be something beyond what's happening in schools themselves that makes people react this way. I just can't work out what it is.
But Math beyond the basics is perceived as unnecessary torture, with no practical use, one has to endure to get a diploma.
So yes, my proposal would be to teach it more in a practical, applied way.
I'm only picking on history or languages as examples. I could have picked literature, or almost anything, really. A lot of what is taught at school isn't necessarily a bunch of super applied skills
There are lots of bad teachers in every discipline, and I'm sure that everything could be taught a lot better. I'm still not getting why maths is singled out.
Plain math is abstract. No humans involved, just numbers and formulas. Nothing to connect to, unless the teacher brings in the real world. Because math is awesome at describing and predicting real world events. But that is usually applied math, like physics. And I loved physics (and history) in school. But math? My brain refused as it saw no benefit except for the needed grades.
The attempts to make history more "scientific", usually for religious or political reasons (e.g., explaining past events throgh class struggle), end up looking like propaganda.
Science is also taught as a set of facts to be memorized, but that is also not science. In both science and history, the most important question is not "what do you know?" but "how do you know?".
And that is exactly the question allmost never being asked in (my) school. "No time for it. Here are the facts. Accept it and learn them, we will determine your future on how well you memorized them"
But to be fair, some of my teachers tried this approach as much as possible, but within the whole framework of the curriculum, not much was possible.
But one can make for example the prediction that the war in Ukraine will be going on for a little bit longer.
Your prediction about the war in Ukraine is not falsifiable.
And the prediction about the war in Ukraine would not be "it'll be like today". The current prediction is, that russia will continue to slowly make ground and move the front lines to the west. There are actually predictions how much and where exactly. I think that gets also falsified in some institutes, but is probably classified.
Maybe so, but I have no clearance and have not seen it. And it would be completely different from history I studied in school. There wasn’t a single prediction, let alone quantitative prediction with time horizon and confidence interval in any of the history books I’ve read.
Many math teachers do not know math, and cannot answer the question "what will I need it for?"
Yet it's also chosen as an arbitrary measure for ranking children and gating their academic and career choices. Kids are "ahead" or "behind" in math. They're tutored during the summer and sent to cram schools. They're tested at every grade level. Math determines access to many fields of study in college. School districts are ranked by math scores.
We have some vague sense that math is important for something. Maybe it fosters intelligence or diligence, both of which are valuable I suppose. But never math for its own sake.
Disclosure: College math major.
The formulas and proofs are certainly valuable, but could come later. And the graphs remain useful (at least for a hack like me) for confirming our understanding of the formulas.
Also, data and graphing would be a way to ease students into programming.
Yes! And have them collect some real world data in biology, or sociology first and suddenly you have education, that is not abstract and dry anymore.
It's a dilemma because math is so broad, and has both pure and applied sides. And a challenge for changing curricula is that the public defines "math" as the precise sequence of topics that they studied in school (and hated).
The math department at my university was viewed very negatively because of this. People doing CS prerequisites and whatnot knew that they weren't there to learn but just to pass a glorified IQ test.
The issue is entirely cultural. Entrepreneurs, celebrities, socialites are venerated, scientists aren't. There's no mainstream cultural recognition of scientists and science itself, at best people get attention who monetize research.
Just compare how many people know Musk but don't know who Tom Mueller is. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller)
Good point, but I would argue more people are unfit for math, than unfit for sports education. (At least in europe)
"There's no mainstream cultural recognition of scientists and science itself"
With the exception of Einstein yes. And maybe Stephen Hawking.
"The issue is entirely cultural."
And yes it is, but I believe this can be changed by making math, the language of science, more approachable.
For me it was a self enforcing effect where it also impacted how I viewed myself and I did not feel confident enough socially.
Obesity is one of the few remaining social stigmas that are "acceptable" to joke about. I don't think the average person know how it makes you feel when people passing you in the street look at you and make comments or try to avoid you.
There are so many micro aggressions that happens where each stare, laugh or comment just breaks you down mentally and isolates you socially.
Yes, that is sadly often the case. My advise if you want to change something, find acticities that are fun. Everything with water is good, if you are overweight, but it seems, you likely would not like the public swimming pool. But there are offerings for water exercises especially for obese people. Being in a group helps ignore what others think. Otherwise there are hidden lakes for example. (Or get a private swimming pool if you have the funds)
Otherwise a (enforced) trampolin might be fun.
Good luck to you.
The "issue" is entirely about money. Sports make so much money because so many have fun watching them. And it's an issue only if you want fame so badly as to make an issue of the fact that what you do is anonymous.
"Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for his work on randomness/stochastic processes" would have been a good headline to have, but they chose theirs deliberately to not reveal the import information at a glance.