Disappointment
ams.org
ams.org
So in a way, nerd sniping is great, it hooks you into a process you enjoy.
> There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.
While we are in a good spot right now. I'm convinced that we need a lot more progress to really make the synthesized simulations / games that I see in my imagination.
Hardware, algorithms, and architecture all have huge room for improvement.
This is very understandable, especially in a professional setting. But - assuming one has not reached a state of total zen - one cannot live a life in complete selflessness. I am guessing there are things that you do for the sheer enjoyment: watch movies, read books, go for walks? Can the reading and practising of pure mathematics not fall under such a use of time?
Maybe you just want to be more efficient about increasing the fun experiences beyond yourself. But don't discount fun for fun's sake either!
In most cases a kid that aces all their math classes will make a great engineer or physicist, which is a good outcome for everybody involved.
And, besides, all the math I use was invented by the 1950’s. At the time, I’m sure they thought some of it was useless. Somebody has to cook up the stuff for the engineers of 2100.
I would have had significantly less fun with a more pragmatic approach, and maybe the tool would not be as polished as a result.
In German, we say “the journey is the goal”.
Which btw, for the non-German speakers, we do because we have one single word ("Ziel") that means both "destination" and "goal". =)
You do use that math constantly especially in shader tricks which do some visual magic based on angles between stuff but the difficulty is not in the math itself at all.
I have somewhat similar feelings on my side. I really enjoy mathematics, but at university, I realized how vast the field is and how it can be fairly easy to dedicate your life to learning something that no one around you cares about. As such, if I ever get back into these disciplines again, I'll probably focus primarily on the math necessary to solve physics problems. Not because I think that's inherently more useful or valuable, but merely as a heuristic to limit the scope, so I don't go insane with the vastness of mathematics.
When I was in grad school, I was surrounded by people who had these interests. I could work on a cool math problem, and people would be interested. I could have a conversation with them about it.
Fast forward to the "work" world, and there's not a single person I know in my city with whom I can have these discussions. And trust me, I looked.
As the OC said, it becomes an incredibly lonely life. If I want to study a typical grad level math course after work hours, it can easily consume all my free time (trying to solve a given problem could take hours).[1] After a few years of trying, I had to abandon it for the sake of my mental health.
In retrospect, there probably is a middle ground, and if I return to it, I'll aim for that middle ground. Intentionally choose topics I can do in bite sized amounts, and topics that I can share online that have a higher chance of engagement.
[1] And this was when I was single without kids. Imagine how much less time you have with kids.
Rural towns are devoid of most things. Every urban area has math PhDs.
Quality of conversation is very different. Here I am, talking to you randomly. But I can't keep pinging you to discuss math.
> Rural towns are devoid of most things. Every urban area has math PhDs.
Most of whom have "moved" on and do not want to do math in their free time.
Or, more pertinently, prevent catastrophic failure (╥_╥)
I don't know how much that applies to games. I guess it depends on the genre. I can imagine that for some games, playtesting and bugfixing gets you to a good state. But for some roguelikes for example, especially ones where there is a large amount of things to combine (so where playtesting just cannot test every combination), I can imagine that "artful engineering" are beneficial for the games' stability and polish. Those are games that are meant to be played over, and over, and over again, in different ways.
And I have to say my training in low dimensional topology and mathematical techniques as a youngster was extremely useful for developing software and software systems.
Practical knowledge has a tendency to overfit and overfit in a society where change of technologies and techniques is as high as it's ever been.
Very few mathematians want to become political enemies of the state, but that's what they're forced to do if they want to rise to this principle. I guarantee that takes away some of the enlightened wonder, and adds back a lot of genuine terror and boring bullshit.
Rounded for whatever you want to do in less, but less rounded in terms of your abilities as mathematician, or even "user of mathematics"
On the backs of more technical people, I suppose?
I reject that approach.
About half of the successful business moves I do depends on developing better mathematical tooling than my competition.
Consider adopting category theory as your lingua franca for modeling real world processes. It's universal and it's everywhere, from software engineering to business strategy and communications.
There's no such thing as nerd sniping when every piece of math you do can be transported to every other endeavor you do. That's the job of Categories, and if you don't use them, then your mathematical education cannot really empower you.
IMO the magazine article was a much more accessible read, and a different story about the author himself and the essay.
Replacing the story feels disrespectful to both the journalist, for his work that certainly only amplified the reach of the essay, as well as the author for denying him the spotlight.
Does he mean academic positions and funding or community attention? Hard to be sure based on the rest of the interview.
Anecdote, but: I knew several math and physics PhD students. About half of the physics ones eventually obtained tenure track faculty positions in the US. Not a single math one did.
e.g. at MIT the ratio of grad students in physics/math is 2.4 even though the undergraduate programs in Math (especially if you include Math+CompSci) are much greater
https://registrar.mit.edu/statistics-reports/enrollment-stat...
I thought that's because people are trading. I'll put your name on my paper if you put mine on yours.
It is always interesting how the people who were in the epistwemology of math could easily predict this. I personally participated in Gregory Chaitin [2] conferences.
[1] https://gwern.net/doc/math/1986-tymoczko-newdirectionsphilos...
These days, my main advice is the same as what Scott Galloway gives to avoid long term disappointment. Follow the bucks, once you have enough of it, you can then think of satisfying your inner curiosity.
> Some students talk about turning to a different career later on, after they’ve made enough money. “Nowadays, English concentrators often say they’re going into finance or management consulting for a couple of years before writing their novel,” said James Wood, a Harvard professor of the practice of literary criticism.
> Mr. Desai said all of this logic goes, “‘Make the bag so you can do good in the world, make the bag so you can go into retirement, make the bag so you can then go do what you really want to do.’”
> But this “really underestimates how important work is to people’s lives,” he said. “What it gets wrong is, you spend 15 years at the hedge fund, you’re going to be a different person. You don’t just go work and make a lot of money, you go work and you become a different person.”
You can write up your "highest art and sophistication" and sell it to whoever wants it.
> If you want to go into mathematics, doing the mathematics itself has to be the thing that’s the reward, because no one cares, and what’s considered important doesn’t always make sense. ... I think 100% of mathematicians think that no one cares, that no one even knows anything about their best work.
> G.H. Hardy was once asked what distinguished Ramanujan as a mathematician. One of the things he said was that Ramanujan had a remarkable capacity for coming up with hypotheses very quickly, but that he was also very quick to revise his hypotheses. He was nimble: If something didn’t work, he was able to pivot and revise his way of thinking.
> the same kind of psychological pressures that make it difficult for people to deal with failure are at work in making it hard for people to carefully and critically evaluate arguments that they have a huge personal investment in being correct.
> One of the great, tremendously useful and valuable functions of good writing is that it gives you a way of seeing what it’s like to be other people. You can see inside people’s heads. This is one of the great gifts of literature: You get to see that everyone else is weird, too, not just you.