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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

It is comparatively easy for a mathematician to relocate, given that, like most scientists, they already have world spanning international networks, and unlike other sciences there is no need for expensive lab equipment. Stuff like LIGO is hard to move around, but there is plenty of places in the world that have a good math library.

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We are getting a lot of very qualified Americans applying for our open positions in Europe. Assuming we are not a special case, it looks like a lot of smart people are looking at options beyond the US.

I'm guessing that Terence really wants to be surrounded by thinkers of his calibre. So he gravitated to the ivy league. Perhaps in the future there will be a new gravity well where these minds congregate?

That there should be only 8 places in the world where you can find elite thinkers, all located in the US, is such extreme American nationalism and straight up ignorant.

Very very funny.

We can thank Hitler for the exodus of academics to the US and for the creation of the Israel/Palestine issue (without the holocaust/ww2, the state would never had been made).

Yeah. We've coasted for a long time on importation of geniuses and on being the only un-bombed industrial nation ... in 1946.

And now we've largely closed the door to geniuses from wealthy countries. (Why take the risk of living in the USA right now?) We've even taken the first few steps towards deliberately driving out the geniuses we have. I didn't expect that even six months ago.

Academic institutions in the last decade or two started pre-filtering based on ideology goals before taking into account actual research. In general the system was veering off as the massive bureaucracy gained mission creep.

So I hear. But how much has that really affected medicine, math, physics, chemistry, engineering? And is destroying universities altogether really the solution?

What do you mean?

Zionism and Jewish colonizing of Palestine started before WW1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism

Yes, but they didn't steal the land until after WW2. What happened in the decades before WW2 is a strong warning to everybody about what can happen when you have mass immigration of young radicals of military age.

Israel/Palestine started long before WW2.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine/World-War-I-and-a...

Yes, but the final push was due to Germany’s neighbors passing the buck on helping fleeing Jews. After the world learned the consequences of that, the political will to create the state was cemented.

Jews were already migrating to British Mandate since the 1900s (read about the Aliyah). Even without Hitler, communist expansion would have resulted in a World War 2 (with different players) and a mass Jewish exodus (from Russia, which happened later on in our timeline). Jews were already carrying out terror attacks on both Palestinians and British troops and Britain was already stretched thin after WW1.

The creation of a rogue Israel happened with decolonization, and while it might have been delayed, was inevitable.

We won't know if Israel would or wouldn't have been created if the Holocaust hadn't happened, but Jewish immigration to Palestine started much earlier in response to renewed pogroms and rising antisemitism in the late 19th / early 20th century. Already in the 1920s there were tensions and occasional eruptions of violence in Palestine.

Stop and think about this rationally for a minute. A first-rate school needs to have an American football team. Otherwise it's basically not in any league.

Don't tell CalTech...

MIT also. Football is such a distraction in the US (I went to a school with a good football team, and people ask me how many games I attended...I can answer none).

That's not what the person said. Give a little bit of the benefit of the doubt when interpreting posts. Using the context of a person who grew up and was educated in the Anglosphere. Obviously the ivy league is going to be one of the more attractive options for finding a larger group of elite mathematical researchers. They have a ton of funding compared to most places and draw in many other brilliant people from around the world. That doesn't mean there's no elite thinkers anywhere else, just that it's inevitably going to be a strong contender for where a very bright person looking for that kind of environment would consider.

Sure, there's also two such places in the UK.

Thing is, I do find myself missing the one I spent nearly a decade living in, because such networks are self-sorting and I didn't realise how rare it was until I failed to find it again after leaving.

(Still, Berlin is doing me good in almost all other aspects besides being able to accidentally find I've moved right around the corner from the same pub frequented by the author of PuTTY and a co-author of the proof that Magic The Gathering is Turing-complete and one of the Debian project leaders (seriously, all three went to the same pub, and I didn't know before I moved to Cambridge the first time back in 2007)).

> there's also two such places in the UK

Oxford and Imperial?

Hah! No, the reason I'd say against Imperial isn't the college itself (but even then, is still third on the list of Oxbridge and), it's similar to why I'm not tripping over smart people here in Berlin: fantastic public transit means the smart people aren't all squished together.

Town and gown, massive town. Diluted organisational opportunity, less room for serendipity in meeting fellow nerds of whatever topic of interest.

That said, I do not know the social organisational structures of much of the USA, so it's plausible that this reasoning doesn't work because the USA has the same spread-out-ness from all the cars, or perhaps everyone in both just knows how to find the nerdy and geeky Schelling points…

But (Old) Cambridge? Geeking opportunities are as densely packed in Cambridge as archeology is within 2km of the Parthenon in Athens. Oxford certainly looks similar to Cambridge in this regard. At least, when I visited, as a tourist, given I didn't live in Oxford at any point.

With the caveat that I have degrees from Oxford and Cambridge but not Imperial

> but even then, is still third on the list of Oxbridge

Is this still true? Any ranking I’ve seen recently generally has it right up there. It feels like it’s a name recognition thing rather than quality meter at this point, like Caltech vs MIT.

Your points about geography are well taken though.

> Any ranking I’ve seen recently generally has it right up there.

Really? Hm.

The listings I've seen, and the first I found, were UK-focused ones, which put Oxford and Cambridge in the top two, sometimes with others as joint-second, then after that Imperial, e.g. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universiti...

But to support your claim, I did just find an international ranking that is confusing me by giving rankings for 2026, and for 2025 and 2026 puts Imperial before (and previous years, behind) both of Oxbridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QS_World_University_Rankings

> So he gravitated to the ivy league. Perhaps in the future there will be a new gravity well where these minds congregate?

Doesn't he work at UCLA?

Currently he is at UCLA which is technically not an Ivy League place but a public ivy. As for thinkers of equal caliber, he is probably quite alone anyway. But if you look at the list of Fields medalists, there is a lot of europeans in that list who are still in europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal#List_of_Fields_me...

relocate for 250k?

This. Someone like this could maybe come up here to Canada, and enjoy slightly a more sane political/cultural climate, but they won't be getting this kind of funding. Academics here are already barely holding on, and even in the best of times there has never been the kind of flow of cash available in the US for scientists and intellectuals.

I imagine a similar story applies to the UK and other places in the Anglosphere

Unfortunately, very true. I think Canada ranks last in the G7 on GDP-percentage science funding. Salaries seem to be OKish, maybe similar to Germany, but cost of living (mainly housing, food is comparable cheap) in Vancouver and Toronto is very high.

UK salaries are atrociously bad. Not sure about funding, but it doesn't seem to be great.

Not every mathematicians has the fame of this person. I don't know much about Terrance to be frank, only red a few posts that landed on HN homepage. That's enough to grasp the level of fame he enjoy, I guess.

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