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ekm2on A Path Less Taken to the Peak of the Math World

Calculus at 11 and never having been challenged for a while at school implies he self studied some courses that he is not explicitly mentioning.

ekm2on A Path Less Taken to the Peak of the Math World

Actually Ed Witten was not a total newbie to advanced Math before grad school.From his commemorative lecture:

At about age 11, I was presented with some relatively advanced math books. My father is a theoretical physicist and he introduced me to calculus. For a while, math was my passion. My parents, however, were reluctant to push me too far, too fast with math (as they saw it) and so it was a long time after that before I was exposed to any math that was really more advanced than basic cal culus. I am not sure in hindsight whether their attitude was best or not. However, the result was that for a number of years the math I was exposed to did not seem fundamentally new and challenging. It is hard to know to what extent this was a factor, but at any rate for a number of years my interest in math flagged.

https://www.sns.ias.edu/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Comemorativ...

ekm2on Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

Long thread and no one talks about just teaching Logic like French schools do.

ekm2on An Indian village addicted to chess

Not really.But I moderate now that I know how it can affect other things.

ekm2on An Indian village addicted to chess

Chess is so addictive it made me drop out of CS grad school.I would compete online every day from 10 pm to 3 am.That is not a good schedule if you want to make it to an 8 a.m class.

ekm2on Do Developers Need College Degrees?

Your metric will lock me out:I did Real and Complex Analysis sophomore year but was forced to take intro to statistics senior year in order to graduate.

ekm2on To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

>a lot of people good at math have poor people skills

All the more reason to open the floodgates so we can get the few people with both skillsets.

ekm2on Buddhism Is Not Just Compatible with Modern Cosmology, It Welcomes It

Maybe you should have specified that it was the Cosmology not Buddhism that was invented by the Catholic priest.

ekm2on Schooling in adolescence raises IQ scores (2011) [pdf]

Creativity.

ekm2on Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

Most mathematical minds prefer Plato.Verbal types adore Aristotle.

ekm2on How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3

There is another guide online: " http://hbpms.blogspot.com/2008/05/stage-1-elementary-stuff.h...

ekm2on 2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Scoreboard

Explain then why Harvard is #3 on the list (and MIT at #6).

ekm2on Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

Actually,Math/Physics, along with Econ,Philosophy as well as International Relations majors score higher than Engineers on the LSAT.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1430654

ekm2on America’s new aristocracy

I think Plato listed them in decreasing levels of desirability as:

Aristocracy->Timocracy->Oligarchy->Democracy->Tyranny

ekm2on How to Be an Expert in a Changing World

Hence the value of meditation.[1]

[1]. http://www.alternet.org/story/152011/how_meditation_makes_yo...

ekm2on Can a simple algebra test predict programming aptitude?

An older study suggests :

In both genders,performance on Mathematics was found to be the best predictor in programming ability,followed by performance on a spatial test.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.110...

ekm2on Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food

The proprietor has apologized more than twice in the emails.I do not think it is fair for the HBS professor to take such drastic measures because a hapless businessman did not understand enough HTML to update a website frequently.

ekm2on Harvard’s Asian Problem

The link i have provided you is the filing and it says Caltech does not consider race.

ekm2on Harvard’s Asian Problem

For example,the California Institute of Technology(Caltech) is a private school that selects its students by strict academic standards and chooses not to consider race.

http://studentsforfairadmissions.org/wp-content/uploads/2014...

ekm2on What line from a book has stuck with you?

I know many people who are incredibly quick at many kinds of study, but they're generally in the humanities. One of my friends taught himself 4 languages in high school, but he can't do math to save his life.

It is says those who are naturally good at math are good at all kinds of study,not as you suggest that those who are good at many kinds of study are good at math

ekm2on What line from a book has stuck with you?

Have you ever noticed that those who have a natural capacity for calculation and arithmetic are, generally speaking,quick in all kinds of study.And those dull minds when trained and exercised in it,if they getting nothing else,at least become sharper than they were before.

Republic of Plato

ekm2on Harvard’s Asian Problem

The brief does not mention Caltech.But for the other two:

MIT considers all aspects of each candidate's background,including racial and ethnic factors..

Stanford is strongly of the view that race and national origin should no more be entirely ignore..

ekm2on Harvard’s Asian Problem

> If you're going to make that comparison it's worth noting that a significant fraction of Harvard students are athletes and the admissions criteria for athletes is different.

Another significant fraction are legacies.

ekm2on The Startup That Built Google’s First Self-Driving Car

Thank you!

I had no idea i was hellbanned(though I wont waste my time begging for an unbanning).

ekm2on The Startup That Built Google’s First Self-Driving Car

So,who is Suzanna Musick?

ekm2on Elon Musk: With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon

I do not understand why you downvoted the only contrarian view of AI in this thread.

ekm2on Scientific Stagnation

My hypothesis is that high end math talent from which scientists are historically recruited simply has other avenues of making money.Wall street and Silicon valley basically milks them away.

ekm2on Lecture 5, How to Start a Startup: Peter Thiel

Does anyone have a transcript of this lecture?

ekm2on C++11 use in Chromium

Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language(4th Edition) is updated for C++11.

ekm2on The Last Answer, by Isaac Asimov

Murray said, “But the odd integers can be derived. If you divide every even integer in the entire infinite series by two, you will get another infinite series which will contain within it the infinite series of odd integers.”

For S={2,4,6,8...}

S/2={1,2,3,4,..}

I used to think the set of even integers is a subset of the natural numbers.Doesnt this suggest that the reverse (the set of natural numbers being a subset of even integers) is actually true?