asdf_snar

Hi Peter,

Thanks a lot for doing this. My partner is on a cap-exempt H1B (academia) and is a citizen of a European country. She has her work authorization, but the visa in her passport is expired, and to my understanding she needs that to re-enter the U.S. should she leave the country. As you know, visas are not being issued until at least Dec. 31st by presidential proclamation. After that, it seems consulates have a huge backlog of visas to issue, so assuming the proclamation is not extended, it seems the time-limiting step will be getting an appointment. It is our understanding that until then, she cannot leave the country without risking her employment, as she may be unable to return to the U.S. for six months or more (which violates the conditions of the H1B).

I have two questions:

1. Is our information correct? We have found conflicting information from "official" sources (universities, lawyers, ...)

2. I understand the desire to prevent abuse of the H1B system. Is there some way in which these travel restrictions on active H1B holders prevents abuse? We're both very frustrated, but the worst part of not being able to see family is that there seems to be no logical reason for it.

Thanks in advance.

> For example, not only students but also modern algebro-geometers on the whole do not know about the Jacobi fact mentioned here: an elliptic integral of first kind expresses the time of motion along an elliptic phase curve in the corresponding Hamiltonian system.

This one resonated with me. At one point I had a problem that had to do with Kahler manifolds, but I knew nothing about them and only had some worked examples using basic ideas from Hamiltonian mechanics that I learned from Arnol'd's book. In hopes of resolving my issues, I spoke to some symplectic geometers and used Hamilton-Jacobi language. They vaguely knew what I was talking about but couldn't carry out any calculations.

I once heard an anecdote about Arnol'd that he came to France and lambasted the French mathematicians on a similar basis -- for all their writing, they couldn't carry out "simple" calculations with a clear vision (as once can when one has a physics motivation). It might have been the anecdote was referring to the Serre-Arnold debate -- thanks for that link.

Of course, Arnol'd has... high standards, to put it mildly. In his book, "Problems for children from 5 to 15", he writes in the preface,

"My long experience has shown that, very frequently, dimwits falling at school behind solve them better than A-grade pupils, since – for their survival at the back of the classroom – they must permanently think more than required “for governing the whole Seville and Granada”, as Figaro used to say about himself, while A-graders cannot catch “what should be multiplied by what” in these problems. I have also noticed that five year old kids solve similar problems better than pupils spoiled by coaching, which in their turn cope with the questions better than university students used to swotting who anyway beat their professors (the worst in solving these simple problems are Nobel and Fields prize winners)."

One of the problems is to sum 1/n^2 from 1 to infty (this is for children not older than 15, remember). Not only would I be unable to do this without modern technology (like Fourier analysis), I also find it amazing that Arnold writes: "prove that the sum is pi^2/6, that is, approximately 3/2", as though the approximation were harder (or perhaps more important) than finding the exact value. To me, that small comment really underlines just how hands-on he was.

Edit: I remembered a joke.

Why did Bourbaki stop writing textbooks?

They found out Serge Lang was one person.

I don't understand how the images that are presented on the landing page relate to a browser. Where is the proposed alternative browsing interface? I don't see a URL, nor how to browse multiple websites simultaneously.

> The only ones benefiting are the companies that sponsor H1B visas by suppressing wages for everyone.

... and those of us (perhaps sufficiently few) who work on H1B legally, for the visa's purpose (insufficient American expertise).

Somewhat of a side-question, but how would one go about about finding jobs where knowing Monte Carlo methods is a primary requirement? It seems most companies want a software developer that knows a bit of this, rather than a statistician/mathematician that knows a bit of software development.

> A lot of mathematicians would consider this a very limited view of the subject.

Could you provide an example of such a mathematician?

I don't see how the article you linked is relevant to the question of whether or not most academic papers are widely read. That being said, the original article is poorly sourced and poorly written.

Perhaps one of the most well-known such gems is Milnor's "Topology from the Differentiable Viewpoint".

https://math.uchicago.edu/~may/REU2017/MilnorDiff.pdf

This person has no idea what they're writing about.

Edited because my post was flagged (I'm not sure why). The definition of correlation coefficient is incorrect, which could have been attributed to a typo, except the author goes on to say "The bottom is, essentially, just stripping the signs away.", suggesting the square root of a sum of squared differences would be the same as the sum of differences, were it not for the signs. That's not how norms work.

The whole paragraph on interpreting a correlation coefficient is particularly painful to read: "... if the correlation is perfect – that is, if the dependent variable increases linearly with the independent, then the correlation will be 1. If the dependency variable decreases linearly in opposition to the dependent, then the correlation will be -1. If there’s no relationship, then the correlation will be 0."

For all its good intentions, I feel like this post hurts more than it helps.

I was going to post, "that's too bad, there's already an excellent one out there." Yep, this is how I learned regex. In fact, I don't even worry about forgetting regex, since 10 minutes on this and I have most of what I need.

Excellent, excellent website.

From the abstract,

"Circle is a compiler that extends C++17 for new introspection, reflection and compile-time execution. An integrated interpreter allows the developer to execute any function during source translation. Compile-time flavors of control flow statements assist in generating software programmatically. The configuration-oriented programming paradigm captures some of the conveniences of dynamic languages in a statically-typed environment, helping separate a programmer's high-level goals from the low-level code and allowing teams to more effectively reason about their software."

While I appreciate your qualm, respectfully I think that no matter how it were introduced, someone would've quibbled. "You should be straightforward", "you should be more detailed", "you should have more ninjas". There's no win. The solution is to hope the readers you care about will be adventurous enough to make two clicks.

I don't understand how the conversion from FLOPs to dollars is done. A footnote says that "These $ figures come with substantial error bars, but we believe they are in the right ballpark." Where are the estimates themselves coming from? Cost of cloud computing? Cooling and power consumption estimates? I feel the article would benefit from adding a sentence fragment in the abstract or introduction that specifies this as I have no idea what I'm looking at right now.