"10 Lessons of an MIT Education" by Gian-Carlo Rota | Hacker News Reader

"10 Lessons of an MIT Education" by Gian-Carlo Rota

math.tamu.edu

61 pointshhm14 comments

What matters most is the ambiance in which the course is taught; a gifted student will thrive in the company of other gifted students.

This sentiment comes up time and time again. The first occurance of it being explicitly stated (to my knowledge) was Thoreau, who said that the advantage of Harvard was simply that: The association of the generation's best. But I believe he stated this in a chapter entitled "Economy", and it ended with, "...and the association of other students costs nothing." No one else points out that important point, and it amounts to this: Charging smart people just for gathering them together is a ripoff.

The same is true with housing. Hey, I'd love to buy one of those foreclosures in detroit for 8 thousand dollars, but the problem is, no other smart people are that smart [1], and so you have to live with crackheads.

[1] Unless they do later, and I become a successful land speculator. That's not the goal, however.

"Mathematics is still the queen of the sciences"

Absolutely. Yet somehow, even Rota (in his isolated world) doesn't fully comprehend the magnitude of this remark...

Cariovascular or strength training for physical exercise.

Meditation or religion for spiritual exercise.

Mathematics for mental exercise.

Alternative view: http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/w/c/wchuang/News/...

Here are a few more essays by Rota:

http://www.rota.org/hotair/hotair.html

"There is some satisfaction, however, for a faculty member in encountering a recent graduate who marvels at the light work load they carry in medical school or law school relative to the grueling schedule they had to maintain during their four years at MIT."

This reminds me of people who dropped comp sci to drink beer and scam chicks over in "business school".

> One: You can and will work at a desk for seven hours straight, routinely

Sign me up. Nothing I like better than being routinely forced to work for 7 hours straight so I can make the grade.

Maybe this is why the smartest people I know drop of out school to learn and work on their own terms.

If you'd think of the work you need to do to get an MIT degree as "forced work" that you need to put in just to "make the grade", then yes, I'd agree you'd be better off dropping out, or going to somewhere where the standards are more lax.

<em>Lesson Five: You don't have to be a genius to do creative work.</em>

Creative work is not the providence of genius alone. It's part luck, part risky personality, and part intelligence.

I've begun to write on this extensively on my blog: http://myphdblogged.blogspot.com

This is a great article. Thanks.

how academic to claim that programmers only implement ideas of others.. is the insight in the new theory, or the revolutionary application of the abstract theory?

That's a way to read it, but I don't think that's what he necessarily says. He says: "Those who do not become computer scientists to the second degree risk turning into programmers who will only implement the ideas of others." You can also read it as: "There are two kind of programmers; if you are a computer scientist to the second degree you risk turning into a second-type programmer."

Well, if programmers don't know the amazing new abstract theory they can't apply it. And admit it, most programmer ideas are about business and code.

Mathematics and mathematicians are both over-hyped. Actually, in my opinion the mathematical notation is the worst 'language' ever.

Mathematical ideas are among the most timeless and beautiful of all the things discovered by civilization. The fact that such pure knowledge (often researched for purely recreational or aesthetic reasons) has so many useful applications in so many areas is something profoundly surprising and humbling.

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