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From Nature:
30 January 2023
Charting a course to make maths truly universalMathematicians leading decolonization efforts say that building knowledge-sharing partnerships with communities is key.
Rachel Crowell… Maths is built on a modern history of elevating the achievements of one group of people: white men. “Theorems or techniques have names associated to them and most of the time, those names are of nineteenth-century French or German men,” such as Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré and Carl Friedrich Gauss, all of whom were white, says John Parker, head of the mathematical sciences department at Durham University, UK. This means that the accomplishments of people of other genders and races have often been pushed aside, preventing maths from being a level playing field.
Personally, I’m pretty proud to belong to the same species as Gauss.
But that’s just me.
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Katie Halper: ‘Diversity’ Is a Ruling-Class Ideology with Christian Parenti
lllReplies: @Intelligent Dasein, @68W58
lll
Gauss and his fellow European’s theories live on because they are useful. Modern technology wouldn’t be possible without them.
Mathematics is a blood sport where only the best survive. Anyone is free to play, but without the necessary skills, winning is not guaranteed. The barriers to entry are very low as proven by Srinivasa Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan. He made great contributions to mathematics in spite of his much less than privileged background.
Plus, the field has been/was/is wide open now and for all of millennia, and the future. At any time in the past, the taxonomic group known as The Diverse could have waded right in there and wowed us with some contributions to analytic number theory. It is an active field today; The Diverse are more than welcome to help unravel many of the outstanding problems in the field, several carrying substantial awards, monetary and otherwise. No better time to make a contribution; fame awaits.
The same could be said about science. Consider Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, who was a brilliant theoretical physicist. The bottom line is that if you've got the intellectual chops, you will succeed and will be lauded for your success.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
That would be cool (kelvin).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urschel
@bomag: "No better time to make a contribution" Nuh nuh nuh nuh...nuh nuh no. These folks are not looking to make a contribution.
Why wasn't Whoopi Goldberg cast in the lead of Good Will Hunting? Thass jus' raciss!
There are so damn many things wrong with that one sentence that I can’t even.
But could Gauss run as fast as Usain Bolt?
Let’s scrap sprinting records as they devalue people who are not black
To same species with Gauss , or with Cantor?
In 20th Century European Communist countries academics had to parrot ‘scientific socialism’ and follow the Party line, and truckle to some charlatans like Lysenko. They even had to pretend that some Party-leaders’ nepo-babies, and ‘activists’ who sprang from workers-and-peasants stock (Soviet-style affirmative action in academia) were valuable co-authors. But so long as they attended enough Party meetings and so-forth, they were allowed to contribute to the advancement of Science most of the time.*
It’s looking like today’s West is gonna dispense with that last part. No more advancement of science— it’s gonna be all Cultural Revolution, all the time, baby!
*The Party was often even proud of them and would reward them with trips to foreign conferences.
Decolonization must be done; so colonizers must take back everything of theirs the colonies use. Mathematics, better farming practices, sanitation, vaccines…..
*cough* Neanderthal *cough*
Nature :
I approve! Very entertaining.
I wonder if she got as far as Algebra II. In the meantime something interesting about Nature was left out of the magazine for this tripe.
ctrl-f “Newton”: “No matches” F.U.!
Also, anyone who writes “maths” instead of “math” who isn’t an Englishman and/or a poor typist is a fag.
.
* “Near” Des Moines, but not IN Des Moines, Iowa. Rachel Crowe(ll) approaches Des Moines as ϵ approaches 0. Le Hospital’s rule? No, wait..
Gauss ought to reverse the race obfuscation of class because, while he was white, his parents were peasants. Actual leftists ought to be embarassingly proud of that and they’re talking about skin color.
—————
OT — A Somali family Punts on America.
https://archive.ph/f8Pxd
Agree. Key to what? Less than what? Simple as what? What are these people hiding?
When you read the article, it boils down to not very much beyond the annoying language, pose and intellectual fluff. Thinking about how to decolonize and what that could actually mean, mentioning non-white contributors and explaining maths and statistics using examples and problems closer to the experiences of the people being taught, which actually should be a normal thing. So nothing shocking or destructive so far. I would be very curious to know if there can be any change to mathematics or didactic concepts in substance.
Demagnetized, not decolonized. It needs to be stripped of its North Pole, Germanic bias and reconstrued with a Southern, people-of-color bias.
The Ishango bone has been interpreted to have anticipated all of modern mathematics—and astronomy. Maybe that will work its way into math textbooks.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishango_bone
Sarcastic takedown of the “bone”:
http://www.bibnum.education.fr/sites/default/files/ishango-analysis_v2.pdf
These people are like graffiti vandals “tagging” a great cathedral , they are are ugly, stupid and small ,unworthy of the great inheritance from their betters
I remember leaving a comment last year about things being named after white men who invested or discovered them. I said then that throughout history few people got the education necessary to do these things and that it’s a shame a lot more people didn’t have a chance to contribute. I still believe that.
Though things are better today, there are still billions of people who practically speaking are shut out of acquiring the necessary background to be an academic, researcher, creator or discover of new important things.
I say all this to show I am sorry the world has denied people opportunities and still does. But this is just crazy here: “This means that the accomplishments of people of other genders and races have often been pushed aside, preventing maths from being a level playing field.” What does John Parker think he is talking about? He seems to be saying there is all this ignored high level math work by women and non Europeans.
If so, where is it and what is it? It is not just recently that white men dominated math. It is History Since The Greeks. Here in US, a lot of blacks and Hispanics are way behind grade level in reading and math. Until they do better, there will be few prepared with the necessary prerequisites to consider advanced degrees in math.
How is it that Nature is publishing these fantasies as history?
Name any two big Gentile mathematicians of 20 or 21st century, without thinking? Youd have to think, or to be an expert metematician yourself.Replies: @notsaying, @bomag, @martin_2, @Dream
Math is ripe for a Sokal Hoax or two. No wonder James Lindsay went into activism.
The Sokal Affair wasn't a hoax as such - although everyone involved uses that term, including Sokal. A better word for the entire episode would be an exposé .
Taken as a whole, the events surrounding that paper showed the vapidity and fatuousness of the field (kek) that Sokal was parodying.
The attempts by the editors of Social Texts to deflect responsibility for their incompetence* were literal reinforcements of the point that Sokal was trying to make (which was "Jargon Salad + Ideological Correctness = Publication").
I've kept a pretty keen eye on retractions for the last couple of decades - there are some retractions in Mathematics journals, but such papers mostly carry on about identity maps (Surprise topology joke!... I'll make my own way out.).
*: Is what they did 'incompetence' though?
“Maths is…”?
Granted, I was only a “C” student in English in the 60’s. But, something about that just ain’t right. I’m sure I would have seen a red “X” over it from Mrs. Moore, had I turned that in.
Also, why do all the spellchecks still underline the word “ain’t” in red? Are we to believe that that word has not evolved into acceptance?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6s6v5RI7mYReplies: @Bardon Kaldian, @anonymous
What was she teaching?
https://www.unz.com/isteve/disparate-impact-law-reigns-over-canada/#comment-5079682 (#9)
Mathematics is a blood sport where only the best survive. Anyone is free to play, but without the necessary skills, winning is not guaranteed. The barriers to entry are very low as proven by Srinivasa Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan. He made great contributions to mathematics in spite of his much less than privileged background.Replies: @bomag, @Bill P, @Prester John, @Ancient Briton, @Anonymous, @AndrewR
Thanks and agree.
Plus, the field has been/was/is wide open now and for all of millennia, and the future. At any time in the past, the taxonomic group known as The Diverse could have waded right in there and wowed us with some contributions to analytic number theory. It is an active field today; The Diverse are more than welcome to help unravel many of the outstanding problems in the field, several carrying substantial awards, monetary and otherwise. No better time to make a contribution; fame awaits.
The rewards today are for those who roll the thing back.
Just put 10,000 Ta’ScwaunDON-dAs in a room with high function calculators and have them push the buttons for hours on end. Eventualy, they will produce brilliant mathmatical theorems.
C’mon, Man!
Gauss and some of the other big boys derived, each of them, so many important results that it might actually reduce confusion if some of their results were renamed for other people.
I always thought there were too damn many things named for Augustin-Louis Cauchy in particular. Seemed like no sooner did I finish one course, thinking I was done with that guy, than he’d rear his head in my next course! It was like whack-a-mole. We could rename the Cauchy-Schwartz inequality, say, for modern scholars of inequality; how does “The DeAngelo-Kendi Inequity” sound?
Then you’ve got the Gaussian distribution in statistics (that’s the official name of the “bell curve”). That one’s so evil maybe it should just be cancelled.
I dunno, just some thoughts.
Interesting. Did not know that.
In other words, the people who we prize haven’t actually contributed anything to the field, so we need to invent achievements and squash those of others to promote our beliefs.
One of the two examples in the rest of the quoted paragraph of non-white-males whose “accomplishments have been pushed aside” is Mary Golda Ross:
“…a Cherokee mathematician and engineer who was a founding member of ‘Skunk Works’, a secretive division of the US aerospace manufacturer Lockheed. There, she developed early designs for space travel and satellites, among other things.”
So, I clicked through on the link for Mary Golda Ross. It’s a National Park Service website about her. It was also easy to learn more about her from the wiki page on her, including the facts that she appeared on national TV in 1958 and was honored at the opening of the Smithsonian American Indian museum.
Here’s the thing, there were 40 founding members of Skunk Works. Who has ever heard of about 35 of them? How is it that Mary Golda Ross’s accomplishments were “pushed aside”?
It’s a tough road even for those in the system. Plenty of talented people have been dissuaded by petty and major politics (Lavoisier!).
But celebrating Gauss and Euler is as much celebrating the system that brought them forth as it is a celebration of the individual; a system of open and competitive inquiry, of considering complex and abstract things beyond just day to day existence; maintaining a society with a need for robust accounting and theology that rewarded intelligence; etc.
Another take: a group of guys set out to build and maintain a society with complications beyond just barter and telling stories around the campfire. Most said it wouldn’t work; that it was a waste of time. But, it unlocked ways to travel and build that let them accomplish much more than previous plans. One reward was naming new discoveries after those in the group that did the critical work in bringing forth these new things. Now, those left behind want in on the party by getting such things named for themselves. I’m not sure the party crashers want to help with the work of keeping this other society’s institutions up and running. Seems they are still happy to sit around the campfire telling stories… while staring at their phones.
Society should encourage integrity and respect of others both past and present.Replies: @notsaying
Chinese family formation far more expensive than US or Japan.
Reuters: https://archive.is/NfHNy
Fertility in Shanghai hit 0.54 TFR in 2022, a worldwide low and a rate that results in a generation being 75% smaller than the prior.
NE Asian fertility is below 1.0 in S Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, most of China. Chinese-Thais and and Chinese Malays also sub-1.
The only absolute advantage of higher population is more data-- said to be to the future AI-driven industry as important as oil.
---
Fields medal laureate Shing-Tung Yau (namesake for Calabi-Yau manifold, explained below by ChatGPT in the voice of Snoop Dogg) on why there aren't many great Chinese mathematicians:
- Unlike the Greeks, the Chinese didn't have pure mathematics, only applied.
- All of the Greek mathematicians were also philosophers and literati, not so for Chinese
- Modern Chinese mathematicians tend to focus on small narrow problems, but lack imagination and are less capable to seeing a macroscopic POV, and setting topics / questions.Replies: @bomag, @Race Engineer, @Pixo
Americans who really want to study higher math will have to study abroad.
Hadn't it been for that Cultural Revolution, among others, China was about to discard the Chinese characters altogether and replace them with a latin script like Vietnam's, not even Pinyin as it stands now, but a more composite system that would have been wide opened to the importation of Western "scientific" and marxist vocabulary in as big doses as in Russian. Moreover what actually remained of the Chinese culture just before Mao's final shock therapy was not the traditional Chinese culture you like at all. In particular the Manchu Empire had destroyed all forms of Taoism with the same expertise the Christians had deployed to scrub the last traces of paganism from European culture, in favour of a very standardized and westernized form of Confucianism.
The Great Awokening of America, on the other hand, is making the new American culture a pure object of ridicule even from those who adopt into it to facilitate their own careers in the corporate world. People who go to the Gulf countries may accept a superficial coating of Islamic habits but develop no respect for that religion that is just ever more ridiculous in its present form. People go there and don turbans and hijabs because the US petro-dollar is there, that's it. Wokery is devaluing America together with the whole West and that is probably its main very purpose, namely to convince Westerners they are no longer first worlders but third worlders who can no longer afford to care about what they should say and think. On the other end of the American political spectrum Trumpism and associated forms of bad religion and neo-conservatism purport to the very same end : telling the most intelligent and enterprising that they no longer need apply in the world to come. The Chinese Cultural Revolution despite the horror it was was an opening parenthesis to an unknown future, while wokery is clearly a closing one on a par with American Evangelism. It namely tells that all progressive endeavours having enabled the West and even more the East to progress in the past are to be discarded as so many forms of racism in favour of the return of the most regressive cultural models from everywhere they can be found out in the world to bring back some kind of new dark age.
Can’t be any more clear that the POc’s are just trying to destroy western civilization.
LOL
Citizenship in this country is pretty valuable, and our rulers have seen fit to allot a chunk of it by lottery. Maybe we should name scientific discoveries by lottery: put your name in, and maybe it will be appended to the next important theorem that someone else explains.
The New Fairness(tm).
Surely this classic history of mathematics (which inspired me to become a math major) will now be discarded?
As will this excellent read?
Gauss looks like Edward G. Robinson after cosmetic surgery.
George Washington Carver is celebrated as one of the greatest American inventors.
Amazingly, he became one of America’s greatest inventors without ever inventing anything the least bit important.
White Guilt and Black Science
https://www.newsweek.com/white-guilt-black-science-opinion-1748199
Maybe instead of “go woke, go broke” the warning to entrepreneurs should be “go public, go woke”.
“Horatio Shvartze, my favorite sub-Saharan mathematician, is just as talented as Gauss. Got that crackahs?”
–Ibram X Kendi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6s6v5RI7mYReplies: @Bardon Kaldian, @anonymous
Cultural appropriation or comedy? You decide.
In response to, “Mathematicians leading decolonization efforts say that building knowledge-sharing partnerships with communities is key.”,
Inverness writes, “There are so damn many things wrong with that one sentence that I can’t even.”
Can’t even *what*? Finish your sentence? Inverness, please list five thing wrong with the sentence you refer to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-x3cS0GtSEReplies: @P.T., @P.T.
I remember reading an interesting piece by Michael Parenti, the father of Christian Parenti, that was a Marxist analysis of the cause of the Civil War. His thesis was that the Civil War was a clash between two modes of production, the growing capitalist mode of production in the North versus an outdated, slave mode of production in the South.
lll
More people than ever are educated in math and science and yet for some reason we are not living in a golden age for either. Mainly we are living in an engineering age where tiny individual contributions rapidly accrete into big technological achievements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-x3cS0GtSEReplies: @P.T., @P.T.
Elite media would much rather talk about racial inequality (except for Jewish wealth and income) than about class inequality.
lll
It doesn’t mean that at all. The sentence is a complete non sequitur. How can someone on a “scientific” journal staff write such crap?
The achievements of White men are much resented. Better we were back in the Stone Age.
lll
Free all those brilliant STEM Negroes in commercials!
Celebrate their achievements!
Will they be decolonising mathematics in China, Japan or Israel?
I think not, more likely they will laugh Homerically at our folly and weakness.
We could rename these crackers’ theories all types of modern shyt, stuff we recognize: “The Crying Baby Theorem,” “The No-Food-On-The-Plate Rule,” “The Pops is in Lockup Law,” until these ofay muhfuckers recognize our contributions AND give us that level playing field.
Gauss dead anyway. Wypipo so stingy they’d rather him have the theory than name it after a young brother. They need to pick a youngster from the hood who strugglin’ and name that joint after him, let him have the glory and raise his self esteem. Who knows what he might accomplish?
Reuters: https://archive.is/NfHNy
Fertility in Shanghai hit 0.54 TFR in 2022, a worldwide low and a rate that results in a generation being 75% smaller than the prior.
NE Asian fertility is below 1.0 in S Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, most of China. Chinese-Thais and and Chinese Malays also sub-1.Replies: @China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms
There’s obviously an inverse relationship– lower and less dense the population, the less expensive is child formation. Even the 5th tier cities in China are as dense as Chicago, and there are no equivalents of Dallas.
The only absolute advantage of higher population is more data– said to be to the future AI-driven industry as important as oil.
—
Fields medal laureate Shing-Tung Yau (namesake for Calabi-Yau manifold, explained below by ChatGPT in the voice of Snoop Dogg) on why there aren’t many great Chinese mathematicians:
– Unlike the Greeks, the Chinese didn’t have pure mathematics, only applied.
– All of the Greek mathematicians were also philosophers and literati, not so for Chinese
– Modern Chinese mathematicians tend to focus on small narrow problems, but lack imagination and are less capable to seeing a macroscopic POV, and setting topics / questions.
AI will generate its own data.
Many examples of population quality bringing forth more knowledge than population quantity.Replies: @China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms
That explains some but not all of it.
Japan is also ultra dense but has much higher fertility, though still depressingly low.
Rural and small city Chinese fertility is also very low, especially in the north.
Jilin has TFR of 0.75 and is less dense than Florida and only a bit denser than Ohio. Those states have more than twice the fertility.Replies: @China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms
Mathematics is a blood sport where only the best survive. Anyone is free to play, but without the necessary skills, winning is not guaranteed. The barriers to entry are very low as proven by Srinivasa Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan. He made great contributions to mathematics in spite of his much less than privileged background.Replies: @bomag, @Bill P, @Prester John, @Ancient Briton, @Anonymous, @AndrewR
A meth addicted murderer and high school dropout made contributions to mathematics from a Washington state prison cell a couple years ago.
The only absolute advantage of higher population is more data-- said to be to the future AI-driven industry as important as oil.
---
Fields medal laureate Shing-Tung Yau (namesake for Calabi-Yau manifold, explained below by ChatGPT in the voice of Snoop Dogg) on why there aren't many great Chinese mathematicians:
- Unlike the Greeks, the Chinese didn't have pure mathematics, only applied.
- All of the Greek mathematicians were also philosophers and literati, not so for Chinese
- Modern Chinese mathematicians tend to focus on small narrow problems, but lack imagination and are less capable to seeing a macroscopic POV, and setting topics / questions.Replies: @bomag, @Race Engineer, @Pixo
Need more explanation.
AI will generate its own data.
Many examples of population quality bringing forth more knowledge than population quantity.
Preposition questions are deeply racist.
See? White people rather have a killer contribute than let a Black Man into the math game. That’s why we hate chall.
The college towns in Iowa are tragically, unbelievably libbed out.
The only absolute advantage of higher population is more data-- said to be to the future AI-driven industry as important as oil.
---
Fields medal laureate Shing-Tung Yau (namesake for Calabi-Yau manifold, explained below by ChatGPT in the voice of Snoop Dogg) on why there aren't many great Chinese mathematicians:
- Unlike the Greeks, the Chinese didn't have pure mathematics, only applied.
- All of the Greek mathematicians were also philosophers and literati, not so for Chinese
- Modern Chinese mathematicians tend to focus on small narrow problems, but lack imagination and are less capable to seeing a macroscopic POV, and setting topics / questions.Replies: @bomag, @Race Engineer, @Pixo
The Greeks; Pascal, Descartes, and Leibniz; Frege, Wittgenstein, and Russell. The relationship between math/mathematicians and philosophy/philosophers has been close.
Another Frenchmen! Fourier, Pascal, Descartes, Lagrange, Galois, Fermat, Poincare, Laplace, Liouville, et al.
Feels over facts. Nothing else matters.
When studying topical points in math and the names of Cantor, Poincare, or Gauss are mentioned, it is simply a reference to their discovery or development, adding a historical dimension, citing from the 19th century, and perhaps their heritage as German or French.
Introduced as 'white men'. Who cares? It's a reductionist view, an inhumanity, to treat someone--to dismiss someone--as ultimately inconsequential due to the immutable trait of skin color.
It's an approach that could insure that racial discrimination endures.
There’s some evidence that points to Gauss having copied from other mathematicians. His opus magnum ‘Disquisitiones Arithmeticae’ published in 1798 was in content little more than a copy of a treatise on number theory that Legendre had started working on some years prior to Gauss apparently inventing all the stuff on his own. However, Legendre only managed to publish his treatise (800 pages) one year after Gauss. Needless to say that practically no one remembers Legendre, not even a proper picture of him exists.
The same points apply to Einstein and possibly Newton.
So No, professional mathematics is hardly meritocratic. It can be easily corrupted. Judging from my own experience while studying mathematics, mathematicians are often profoundly petty, jealous and frequently indulge in weird cults. Only psychologists, physicians and evolutionary biologists are worse when it comes to adhering to dogma (and you really wouldn’t expect mathematicians to be dogmatic until you talk to them)
A running joke is that the way to show science discoveries is graduate students doing the work; the professor comes in, pushes them out of the way, and takes credit.
Highlights that much of Science is a group effort. A field advances; gets pretty close to a discovery; a talented person comes along and makes the last hard push to a reveal; gets his name on the thing.Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum
What you say is true, however, in at least one communist country the mathematics education was better and more difficult than it was and is in the US.
After growing up under communism, studying sometimes by kerosine lamp with a winter coat on when the government shut down the heat and electricity, my wife earned her way into Romania’s top university, one known for mathematics.
The admission selectivity was 5%, and the entry exam was three days long. There she completed the five-year math degree, one far superior to an American bachelor’s, and was offered the Ph.D. program and a professorship.
When on a visit to Connecticut, she discovered that she could make more money babysitting than as a mathematics professor at Romania’s top university, so she decided to get a master’s degree here and teach math, and get citizenship.
She saved some of her elementary and high school math books. They were teaching her things in sixth grade that I, a “gifted” student did not see until eighth grade — and they were far more thorough.
Compared to at least one communist country’s, the American math curriculum has been pathetic for at least fifty years. I have seen that with my own eyes.
Which only bolsters my opinion that education isn't really that important beyond a certain point.
The truly gifted in the US found ways to solve problems better than any other nation without requiring the hypercompetitive early schooling that so many other nations have.Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum, @Buzz Mohawk, @J.Ross
Euler had so many discoveries that many of them are NOT named after him. I remember reading that otherwise, there would be too many “Euler’s theorem” and “Euler’s postulate.”
I also remember reading that something that Gauss had first discovered was not named after him but someone else.
If you’re good at math, you’re good at everything. But blacks can’t learn math so it’s being phased out in our schools.!!! We are raising a generation of engineers who can’t calculate and in the near future, nothing will work and nothing will fit.
I keenly await the Gabon Gauss.
OK, let’s call their bluff. We’ll re-name the Pythagorean theorem the Ibram X. Kendi Theorem of Anti-Racism. Same old theorem, but now it’s been officially de-colonized. Now there’s no excuse. Now we ask the poor oppressed darlings to prove it, three different ways (I forget how many ways there are to prove it, but there’s a lot). It’s simple high-school level geometry, nowhere near Gauss. They can even rap their proofs, if they feel like it.
They won’t be able to do it, but we already knew that.
So question #2 on the exam is: So, we did what you asked, but you couldn’t do what we asked. So, what’s your next bullsh!t excuse, homie?
btw, the next time you hear some Hotep guy spouting on about how the Egyptians invented math, ask him to describe the difference between the Pythagorean relation and the Pythagorean theorem. Comedy will ensue.
Per crazy female Rachel Crowell:
So this is what “Nature” (publication) now thinks adds to the intellectual debate stew.
Any field dominated by one particular sex or race, etc. is only the result of evil people “pushing aside” poor victims, unlike the pushers.
Is that what she thinks of long distance runners and marathoners? They seem rather limited at the top rank, like pro basketball players.
What “level playing field” is denied here? “Maths” (the Brit term) is open to anyone with a pencil, pen or computer or a simple piece of paper. Like chess, rules are clear and instruments simple.
There are female and non White mathematicians of note. Just not many of them.
This bitter sense of resentment against more successful people is a sick psychological defect. Leads to very bad real world outcomes. Yet this sick puppy is being feted in a prestegious (?) “science” publication as some kind of authority.
Instead, she should start the Journal of African Female Mathematicians, so we can overcome this problem once and for all.
This is what happens when the modern Left colonizes your institutions with their built in holiness spirals.
Mathematics is a blood sport where only the best survive. Anyone is free to play, but without the necessary skills, winning is not guaranteed. The barriers to entry are very low as proven by Srinivasa Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan. He made great contributions to mathematics in spite of his much less than privileged background.Replies: @bomag, @Bill P, @Prester John, @Ancient Briton, @Anonymous, @AndrewR
“Mathematics is a blood sport where only the best survive.”
The same could be said about science. Consider Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, who was a brilliant theoretical physicist. The bottom line is that if you’ve got the intellectual chops, you will succeed and will be lauded for your success.
Thanks to raw data our meta-host has provided along with MIT Hillel, they're now down to a tenth of MIT's undergraduates, ~110 per class. We also hear bad top-line stuff about Caltech. I doubt things are much better at other top R1 schools and most don't teach well, and and a bachelor’s ticket you have to pay of is necessary to get your Ph.D. and then go further on the road.
I suppose a theoretical high energy physics breakthrough could come from someone outside of academia, although we'd have to put down string theory first or it would have to get the attention of someone big outside that cult. See for example Bose writing to Einstein after the former couldn't get published in the U.K. Rare examples like him and Chandrasekhar don't prove much for general populations or other individuals.
And that's before we get into how much mental energy has to be constantly exerted to not get canceled before you have a big result.Replies: @shale boi
All mathematical theorems should be named after the large sheboon Michelle Obama….
Katherine Johnson was so overrated….that we should be talking about the myth of Katherine Johnson……
“Then you’ve got the Gaussian distribution in statistics (that’s the official name of the “bell curve”).”
Interesting. Did not know that.
This is the only John Parker I trust on race relations
What we need is a Netflix mini series starring Tilda Swinton as Sir Isaac Newton and Jussie Smollett as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
What’s with this “decolonize” stuff? It’s all the the rage here in Canada among the woke. In fact they even started adding an additional “D” to EDI for “decolonize”. I find it funny to see here in Canada these activists who are often the children of immigrants demanding to “decolonize” institutions that their communities had nothing to do with building.
It seems to me what they really mean is to “colonize”; to take what others who came before them have built and make it their own.
The only absolute advantage of higher population is more data-- said to be to the future AI-driven industry as important as oil.
---
Fields medal laureate Shing-Tung Yau (namesake for Calabi-Yau manifold, explained below by ChatGPT in the voice of Snoop Dogg) on why there aren't many great Chinese mathematicians:
- Unlike the Greeks, the Chinese didn't have pure mathematics, only applied.
- All of the Greek mathematicians were also philosophers and literati, not so for Chinese
- Modern Chinese mathematicians tend to focus on small narrow problems, but lack imagination and are less capable to seeing a macroscopic POV, and setting topics / questions.Replies: @bomag, @Race Engineer, @Pixo
“ There’s obviously an inverse relationship– lower and less dense the population, the less expensive is child formation. Even the 5th tier cities in China are as dense as Chicago, and there are no equivalents of Dallas.”
That explains some but not all of it.
Japan is also ultra dense but has much higher fertility, though still depressingly low.
Rural and small city Chinese fertility is also very low, especially in the north.
Jilin has TFR of 0.75 and is less dense than Florida and only a bit denser than Ohio. Those states have more than twice the fertility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jilin#Urban_areas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida#Cities_and_towns
Shiny skyscrapers isn't necessarily a signal of wealth. Single-family homes with land or brownstones are nice. There are zero skyscrapers in Switzerland but a lot in Philippines.
2. Unlike Florida, Manchuria is in general economically sluggish
https://i.postimg.cc/0NDRzxjC/Gdp-per-capita-of-the-administrative-division-in-China.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP_per_capita
3. The PRC real estate market is ponzi-like-- hoi polloi spend years getting overinflated degrees for a job, then hurries to buy an apartment in a high rise lest being priced out later, but enslaved by a mortgage.
Whereas the CCP elites milks the most out of cheap labor, has a US green card and speculates on real estate in Vancouver.
*Changchun was under Japanese rule one the most prosperous city in Asia. It was called 新京 Shinkyo "New Capital" as in have been considered as an alternate capital to Tokyo. Its then population was ten times smaller.Replies: @Pixo, @GomezAdddams
Thus, “Plaques for Hacks.”
More please
https://phys.org/news/2020-05-inmate-math-discoveries.htmlReplies: @stari_momak
Not only is it feels over facts–it’s introducing facts irrelevant (race) to math as an obstacle, not to be overcome, but to be both erased (naming convention) and made permanent as an injunction against whites.
When studying topical points in math and the names of Cantor, Poincare, or Gauss are mentioned, it is simply a reference to their discovery or development, adding a historical dimension, citing from the 19th century, and perhaps their heritage as German or French.
Introduced as ‘white men’. Who cares? It’s a reductionist view, an inhumanity, to treat someone–to dismiss someone–as ultimately inconsequential due to the immutable trait of skin color.
It’s an approach that could insure that racial discrimination endures.
No, cast Jussie as Évariste Galois, and cast a white actor as the guy who won their duel. Galois dies and mobs burn down the 3rd Precinct Bastille…
This is Rachel Crowell’s page from Quanta, which is some kind of online science mag:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/authors/rachel-crowell/
Notice something? All the stories about discoveries by women (and I’m assuming they are about some kind of discovery – maybe not – haven’t read them) show a picture of that woman. All the stories about men show some kind of graphic.
And this is America, Rachel. We say “math”, not “maths”.
Any field dominated by one particular sex or race, etc. is only the result of evil people "pushing aside" poor victims, unlike the pushers.
Is that what she thinks of long distance runners and marathoners? They seem rather limited at the top rank, like pro basketball players.
What "level playing field" is denied here? "Maths" (the Brit term) is open to anyone with a pencil, pen or computer or a simple piece of paper. Like chess, rules are clear and instruments simple.
There are female and non White mathematicians of note. Just not many of them.
This bitter sense of resentment against more successful people is a sick psychological defect. Leads to very bad real world outcomes. Yet this sick puppy is being feted in a prestegious (?) "science" publication as some kind of authority.
Instead, she should start the Journal of African Female Mathematicians, so we can overcome this problem once and for all.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
Note since I got really serious about SCIENCE!!! in the 1970s Nature has been the most prestigious general science journal in the world. And this item is from the original real thing, not one of the associated journals, and published in Official paper version, is not just web fluff.
This is what happens when the modern Left colonizes your institutions with their built in holiness spirals.
Let's scrap sprinting records as they devalue people who are not blackReplies: @Curmudgeon
Since the beginning of the entire woke “equality” drivel, I can’t tell you how many times I have got blank stares when posing the question: If everyone is equal, why bother with the Olympics?
I suppose it lets the Woke know who to hate.
Mathematics is a blood sport where only the best survive. Anyone is free to play, but without the necessary skills, winning is not guaranteed. The barriers to entry are very low as proven by Srinivasa Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan. He made great contributions to mathematics in spite of his much less than privileged background.Replies: @bomag, @Bill P, @Prester John, @Ancient Briton, @Anonymous, @AndrewR
If Miss Crowell has any energy (watts, joules) left over after decolonizing math, she could start on mag/elec (amps, volts, farads, henrys, ohms etc.) and put some force (newtons) behind her effort. I wonder if she drives a Tesla (tesla)?
That would be cool (kelvin).
Maf beez HAR’
Gauss was a guy who focused on what he considered only significant mathematical problems. His motto: “Few but ripe.”
In my better moments I’m capable of feeling pity for these people. Imagine being so small minded or brainwashed by race baiters that you are troubled by the historical racial distribution of great minds, rather than by the reality that our society is incapable of producing men like them anymore, or at least of putting them to a task suitable to their talents should such a one appear.
That explains some but not all of it.
Japan is also ultra dense but has much higher fertility, though still depressingly low.
Rural and small city Chinese fertility is also very low, especially in the north.
Jilin has TFR of 0.75 and is less dense than Florida and only a bit denser than Ohio. Those states have more than twice the fertility.Replies: @China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms
1. Florida is much more spread out than Jilin, which has New York-sized metropolitan city– Changchun*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jilin#Urban_areas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida#Cities_and_towns
Shiny skyscrapers isn’t necessarily a signal of wealth. Single-family homes with land or brownstones are nice. There are zero skyscrapers in Switzerland but a lot in Philippines.
2. Unlike Florida, Manchuria is in general economically sluggish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP_per_capita
3. The PRC real estate market is ponzi-like– hoi polloi spend years getting overinflated degrees for a job, then hurries to buy an apartment in a high rise lest being priced out later, but enslaved by a mortgage.
Whereas the CCP elites milks the most out of cheap labor, has a US green card and speculates on real estate in Vancouver.
*Changchun was under Japanese rule one the most prosperous city in Asia. It was called 新京 Shinkyo “New Capital” as in have been considered as an alternate capital to Tokyo. Its then population was ten times smaller.
The metropolitan part of Changchun has 5 million compared to about 20 million for NYC. There’s another 4 million people in the hinterlands, which are part of the city which is 9000 sq miles, compared to 300sq miles for NYC.
In other words, Changchun is a lot closer to Miami metro than NY.
The point is even when you control for density and cost of living, Chinese and S Koreans have extraordinarily low fertility.
Of course China’s megacities are in a class by themselves for real estate prices compared to income. They are more than twice as bad as SF, NY, London, and Tokyo.
I don’t see it as a Ponzi really, just a regular bubble. If anything overpaying for real estate makes sense since other possible investments for their high savings rate would be bank accounts that pay almost nothing or China’s extremely corrupt stock market.
My mom’s best friend’s husband was a Skunk Works engineer named Henry Combs. According to his boss Ben Rich’s wonderful memoir “Skunk Works,” he was the “irascible genius” who was the main designer of the SR71. But the National Park Service doesn’t honor him. On the other hand, there is a small literature on this subject so he’s not totally ignored by history. But there isn’t going to be a “Hidden Figures” movie about the white guy who designed the double delta wing of the fastest airplane of all time.
On the other hand, this Mary Ross was a really good engineer, better than my dad who didn’t stick at the Skunk Works, whereas she had a long fine career there. And she had an interesting story. She was a direct descendant of John Ross, the famous head chief of the Cherokee in Andrew Jackson’s day. Of course, he was only 1/8th Indian, so I don’t know how Indian she was by blood quantum.
Although John Ross was in fact 1/8th Cherokee by blood, I’m pretty sure his wives (he was married three times; his first wife died on the Trail of Tears) had more Cherokee ancestry than Ross did. Ross was also brought up as both a Cherokee and a Scot; today, the Scots clan of Ross recognizes John Ross and his descendants as honored members of the clan.
I don’t know if Mary Ross is actually buried in the Ross Cemetery in Tahlequah, but there’s a stone monument there celebrating her life and accomplishments (I was out there several years ago for my own family reasons but I was familiar with her story). Also, if you’re ever out that way, the Cherokee museum is very interesting; as you might expect, there’s a lot of focus on the Trail of Tears.
Granted, I was only a "C" student in English in the 60's. But, something about that just ain't right. I'm sure I would have seen a red "X" over it from Mrs. Moore, had I turned that in.
Also, why do all the spellchecks still underline the word "ain't" in red? Are we to believe that that word has not evolved into acceptance?Replies: @Steve Sailer
Nature is published in London, so it’s a Brit-ism, like how soccer teams are plural in the World Cup: “England are winning.”
Inverness writes, "There are so damn many things wrong with that one sentence that I can’t even."
Can't even *what*? Finish your sentence? Inverness, please list five thing wrong with the sentence you refer to.Replies: @Poirot
• Can’t Even:
The aleph-ant in the room.
Did they run out of Greek?
> in at least one communist country the mathematics education was better and more difficult than it was and is in the US.
Which only bolsters my opinion that education isn’t really that important beyond a certain point.
The truly gifted in the US found ways to solve problems better than any other nation without requiring the hypercompetitive early schooling that so many other nations have.
The problem is, I think we are thus wasting a lot of lower-level talent here. People like my wife overcome things. They are the top, but there are many others who should be facilitated in our country, because we have the means and that would benefit everyone.Replies: @megabar, @GomezAdddams
I do not know where you see any white people dominating Math. Them matematicians are largely Jews with some East Indians and Chinese here and there. Had been so for over a century.
Name any two big Gentile mathematicians of 20 or 21st century, without thinking? Youd have to think, or to be an expert metematician yourself.
I would certainly count anyone Jewish as white.Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum
All sciences have Europeans at the front. Something there about Western inventiveness and creativity. The media downplays it for Reasons.
Still some gas in the tank. But, as another commenter asked, are we raising any more? And can we find them if we do?Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum
Out of 64 Fields medallists, there are 13 Jews and two half Jews. 2 Indians and 3 Chinese have won the medal.Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum
Which only bolsters my opinion that education isn't really that important beyond a certain point.
The truly gifted in the US found ways to solve problems better than any other nation without requiring the hypercompetitive early schooling that so many other nations have.Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum, @Buzz Mohawk, @J.Ross
Yes, and these ways in US are well known, and invariable are such: get born in Pale of Russia, or at least in Austria-Hungaria, get through a hypercompetitive Russian or German schooling, and emigrate to US to solve problems better than the other nations. Problem solved.
There’s already a math concept named partially in honor of an African American. Ruth-Aaron pairs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth%E2%80%93Aaron_pair
So rename pi after Tony Gwynn, who had 3,141 career hits, and rename e (base of natural log) after George Scott, who had 271 career home runs.
The scientific achievements of Western Civilization are open to everyone. Higher math was at one time almost entirely a development of Western Civilization no matter the brilliant individual geniuses that were outside of it. Decolonization is a buzz word that just raises ire on all sides, an attempt to erase the history of pale stale males because Euro-ethnics are resented. So art, books and names are erased. More ominously the individuals are erased as you said by the party crashers.
Society should encourage integrity and respect of others both past and present.
It’s not clear what you mean by ‘ripe for‘, but Mathematics has far too many genuinely-talented people for a Sokal-type paper that purported to be mathematics to make it past peer review. Such a paper would go out to Mathematicians for review, and it would be rejected – as the Sokal paper would have been if it had gone out to Physicists (it included enogh claims about Physics to warrant such a review).
The Sokal Affair wasn’t a hoax as such – although everyone involved uses that term, including Sokal. A better word for the entire episode would be an exposé .
Taken as a whole, the events surrounding that paper showed the vapidity and fatuousness of the field (kek) that Sokal was parodying.
The attempts by the editors of Social Texts to deflect responsibility for their incompetence* were literal reinforcements of the point that Sokal was trying to make (which was “Jargon Salad + Ideological Correctness = Publication“).
I’ve kept a pretty keen eye on retractions for the last couple of decades – there are some retractions in Mathematics journals, but such papers mostly carry on about identity maps (Surprise topology joke!… I’ll make my own way out.).
*: Is what they did ‘incompetence’ though?
Which only bolsters my opinion that education isn't really that important beyond a certain point.
The truly gifted in the US found ways to solve problems better than any other nation without requiring the hypercompetitive early schooling that so many other nations have.Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum, @Buzz Mohawk, @J.Ross
This has been my thought exactly, ever since learning from my wife about her experience over there.
The problem is, I think we are thus wasting a lot of lower-level talent here. People like my wife overcome things. They are the top, but there are many others who should be facilitated in our country, because we have the means and that would benefit everyone.
Hmmm... Wasting in what sense? I don't think there are lots of people given insufficient education to achieve their potential in the US.
If anything, I would argue the opposite is true. We push too many people to stay in school too long, for overly academic degrees, and have too many worthless white-collar careers. Mid-level minds are great, productive people, but not when we treat them as academics.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
People who talk of Decolonization like this should be accused of Cultural Appropriation although it’s actually more like cultural erasure A rhetorical argument over ridiculous terms but rhetoric beats dialectic in public debate.
Is it really necessary to tell the audience that Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, and Carl Friedrich Gauss were white? Who wouldn’t already know that, or be able to guess?
The irony is that Gauss came from benighted peasant stock.
If there was ever a case of overcoming structural barriers, etc, he was it.
In this respect — as well as some others — he contrasts conspicuously with Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, et al.
lllReplies: @Intelligent Dasein, @68W58
That thesis is correct, but it is hardly unique to Parenti. The same idea has been expressed in such diverse places as Decline of the West (Spengler) and Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), and I think most people who think critically about the subject pretty much take it as a given.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jilin#Urban_areas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida#Cities_and_towns
Shiny skyscrapers isn't necessarily a signal of wealth. Single-family homes with land or brownstones are nice. There are zero skyscrapers in Switzerland but a lot in Philippines.
2. Unlike Florida, Manchuria is in general economically sluggish
https://i.postimg.cc/0NDRzxjC/Gdp-per-capita-of-the-administrative-division-in-China.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP_per_capita
3. The PRC real estate market is ponzi-like-- hoi polloi spend years getting overinflated degrees for a job, then hurries to buy an apartment in a high rise lest being priced out later, but enslaved by a mortgage.
Whereas the CCP elites milks the most out of cheap labor, has a US green card and speculates on real estate in Vancouver.
*Changchun was under Japanese rule one the most prosperous city in Asia. It was called 新京 Shinkyo "New Capital" as in have been considered as an alternate capital to Tokyo. Its then population was ten times smaller.Replies: @Pixo, @GomezAdddams
“New York-sized metropolitan city– Changchun“
The metropolitan part of Changchun has 5 million compared to about 20 million for NYC. There’s another 4 million people in the hinterlands, which are part of the city which is 9000 sq miles, compared to 300sq miles for NYC.
In other words, Changchun is a lot closer to Miami metro than NY.
The point is even when you control for density and cost of living, Chinese and S Koreans have extraordinarily low fertility.
Of course China’s megacities are in a class by themselves for real estate prices compared to income. They are more than twice as bad as SF, NY, London, and Tokyo.
I don’t see it as a Ponzi really, just a regular bubble. If anything overpaying for real estate makes sense since other possible investments for their high savings rate would be bank accounts that pay almost nothing or China’s extremely corrupt stock market.
The problem is, I think we are thus wasting a lot of lower-level talent here. People like my wife overcome things. They are the top, but there are many others who should be facilitated in our country, because we have the means and that would benefit everyone.Replies: @megabar, @GomezAdddams
> The problem is, I think we are thus wasting a lot of lower-level talent here. People like my wife overcome things. They are the top, but there are many others who should be facilitated in our country, because we have the means and that would benefit everyone.
Hmmm… Wasting in what sense? I don’t think there are lots of people given insufficient education to achieve their potential in the US.
If anything, I would argue the opposite is true. We push too many people to stay in school too long, for overly academic degrees, and have too many worthless white-collar careers. Mid-level minds are great, productive people, but not when we treat them as academics.
https://phys.org/news/2020-05-inmate-math-discoveries.html
I’m confused. Is Mr Parker saying that the achievements of Gauss et al should have received less elevation than they obtained, or that the achievements of others should have received more elevation than they obtained, or both?
Presumes that All Men Are Created Equal, so any difference in outcome must be discussed at length in the journals of our time.
Otherwise, it's the usual current plan of the Left: find where demographics skew for the bad guys; call for change that installs their troops.
His name is Christopher Havens. Sad story. He seems genuinely repentent for his crime.
https://phys.org/news/2020-05-inmate-math-discoveries.html
Mathematics is a blood sport where only the best survive. Anyone is free to play, but without the necessary skills, winning is not guaranteed. The barriers to entry are very low as proven by Srinivasa Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan. He made great contributions to mathematics in spite of his much less than privileged background.Replies: @bomag, @Bill P, @Prester John, @Ancient Briton, @Anonymous, @AndrewR
Ramanujan: less than privileged, yes, but people forget that he did go to school. Still, one of the best examples, along with Terence Tao. And then there’s the NFL player John Urschel, the PhD who took courses through distance learning during the season. M.I.T. much?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urschel
: “No better time to make a contribution” Nuh nuh nuh nuh…nuh nuh no. These folks are not looking to make a contribution.
Why wasn’t Whoopi Goldberg cast in the lead of Good Will Hunting? Thass jus’ raciss!
I didn’t know how unknown Legendre was! You definitely hear about the polynomials when solving Schroedinger’s Equation for the hydrogen atom–standard part of late undergrad, early grad physics and chemistry…not talking string theory, but very normal stuff. They’re also referred to in any standard diffyQ textbook. I sort of get confused of all the different French L-name mathematicians.
I could be wrong about this but my guess is that almost no normal decent human person wants to be a professional mathematician because such a life would involve spending inordinate amounts of time around other professional mathematicians. Sure, some of them are decent human beings, but often they are not people with any empathy at all , and it takes a heart of stone not to be appalled at their idea of “humor” – which for them, is generally nothing more than, in a mocking way, saying something that is stupid, and then laughing at their idea that there are people in the world who do not know that what they said was stupid, while all the time they want to tell you , they really want to tell you, how smart they are.
Gauss was not like that – Euler was, a little —- and Newton, the most famous mathematician in the English-speaking world, was remembered (rightly or wrongly) by some of his contemporaries as the sort of person who never had a friend and never realized it is wrong not to want to have a friend.
Just saying – the dislike people have for mathematicians of old is not simply what you might think it is.
Many mathematicians of old deserved the pity and contempt of their fellow humans, as they did not understand that their lack of understanding and their lack of empathy for others was not a good thing.
True diversity and inclusion in action.Replies: @Inverness, @That Would Be Telling
Which only bolsters my opinion that education isn't really that important beyond a certain point.
The truly gifted in the US found ways to solve problems better than any other nation without requiring the hypercompetitive early schooling that so many other nations have.Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum, @Buzz Mohawk, @J.Ross
The personal or microcomputer broke the ComBloc precisely because they could only compete through massive centralization and planning (= they kick our ass in teaching physics) and you can’t centralize Wozniak’s parents’ garage.
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/images/equations/Aleph-0/NumberedEquation1.svg
Did they run out of Greek?Replies: @J.Ross
All them Indic math geniuses and no nagari.
Horace Rumpole, Nicholas Roerich, and I stare at you quite rudely. But by all means enjoy the Thomas Kinkade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jilin#Urban_areas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida#Cities_and_towns
Shiny skyscrapers isn't necessarily a signal of wealth. Single-family homes with land or brownstones are nice. There are zero skyscrapers in Switzerland but a lot in Philippines.
2. Unlike Florida, Manchuria is in general economically sluggish
https://i.postimg.cc/0NDRzxjC/Gdp-per-capita-of-the-administrative-division-in-China.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP_per_capita
3. The PRC real estate market is ponzi-like-- hoi polloi spend years getting overinflated degrees for a job, then hurries to buy an apartment in a high rise lest being priced out later, but enslaved by a mortgage.
Whereas the CCP elites milks the most out of cheap labor, has a US green card and speculates on real estate in Vancouver.
*Changchun was under Japanese rule one the most prosperous city in Asia. It was called 新京 Shinkyo "New Capital" as in have been considered as an alternate capital to Tokyo. Its then population was ten times smaller.Replies: @Pixo, @GomezAdddams
How is Isshi Shiro’s “Memorial Project” at Fort Detrick coming along?
The problem is, I think we are thus wasting a lot of lower-level talent here. People like my wife overcome things. They are the top, but there are many others who should be facilitated in our country, because we have the means and that would benefit everyone.Replies: @megabar, @GomezAdddams
Then why is USA 32,000,000,000,000 in Debt and using higher mathematical finesse—Who is going to repay it beginning When??
It seems to me what they really mean is to "colonize"; to take what others who came before them have built and make it their own.Replies: @GomezAdddams
Pick up any Canadian Police Website and check out Who is on “Tte Most Wanted List” — after scrolling past several brown and black faces with handles such as Amin, Abdul, Abdullah, Farouk,Faroij, Rayram, Kareem, Tyeree, Jimbob, Amosandy, Tonto, Born Without a Brain, Sleeps With Wolves——–you find a white face and can shout “Bingo”—Bradley Barton–a “framed” trucker.
The same could be said about science. Consider Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, who was a brilliant theoretical physicist. The bottom line is that if you've got the intellectual chops, you will succeed and will be lauded for your success.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
I really don’t think so much any more in the US. Math, yes, you just have to publish a proof to something no one has been able to do and of course you’d need to opportunity to think hard, although applied math generally requires resources white males are being gate-kept out of.
Thanks to raw data our meta-host has provided along with MIT Hillel, they’re now down to a tenth of MIT’s undergraduates, ~110 per class. We also hear bad top-line stuff about Caltech. I doubt things are much better at other top R1 schools and most don’t teach well, and and a bachelor’s ticket you have to pay of is necessary to get your Ph.D. and then go further on the road.
I suppose a theoretical high energy physics breakthrough could come from someone outside of academia, although we’d have to put down string theory first or it would have to get the attention of someone big outside that cult. See for example Bose writing to Einstein after the former couldn’t get published in the U.K. Rare examples like him and Chandrasekhar don’t prove much for general populations or other individuals.
And that’s before we get into how much mental energy has to be constantly exerted to not get canceled before you have a big result.
It's almost impossible to make experimental results without a lab, shop, training, etc. The days of Franklin flying kites are gone. This is excepting amateur astronomy where discoveries are still made. But I see this more like biological animal collecting or the like.
As far as theoretical results it's hard for almost anyone (let alone outsiders) to make new discoveries. What was the last major new result? BCS? Standard Model? And the experiments that could drive new results all seem to require very high energies or the like. Climbing up an asymptote.
Probably the one area that shows as a clear opportunity would be explaining high temperature superconductivity (more than handwave-y D-wave comments).
Here's an example of a (quasi) outsider making a big recent discovery in math:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang
The Cherokee don’t go by blood quantum; if you can show direct descent from someone on the Dawes Rolls, you’re Cherokee. This is what doomed that idiot Warren and her “family stories about a Cherokee ancestor” crap.
Although John Ross was in fact 1/8th Cherokee by blood, I’m pretty sure his wives (he was married three times; his first wife died on the Trail of Tears) had more Cherokee ancestry than Ross did. Ross was also brought up as both a Cherokee and a Scot; today, the Scots clan of Ross recognizes John Ross and his descendants as honored members of the clan.
I don’t know if Mary Ross is actually buried in the Ross Cemetery in Tahlequah, but there’s a stone monument there celebrating her life and accomplishments (I was out there several years ago for my own family reasons but I was familiar with her story). Also, if you’re ever out that way, the Cherokee museum is very interesting; as you might expect, there’s a lot of focus on the Trail of Tears.
Or in an Arabic Madrasa. Mastering English as a good second language is still a worthy status symbol (for how long?), but being limited to it by birth is no longer one at all : it is more and more perceived again as a peasant language to be used only when taking your audience for idiots. You cannot even compare the Great Awokening of America to the Chinese cultural revolution : the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution, despite its nuking of so many monuments, made every Chinese prouder than ever his history to be Chinese and to speak Han, and also made the rest of the world really afraid of China : the horrors of that revolution were anything but an object of ridicule. The feeling that China could topple the whole of Western civilisation by a violent act led by super-intelligent tyrants together with a fanaticized people pregnant of a new unknown science-fiction-like religion, was deadly serious.
Hadn’t it been for that Cultural Revolution, among others, China was about to discard the Chinese characters altogether and replace them with a latin script like Vietnam’s, not even Pinyin as it stands now, but a more composite system that would have been wide opened to the importation of Western “scientific” and marxist vocabulary in as big doses as in Russian. Moreover what actually remained of the Chinese culture just before Mao’s final shock therapy was not the traditional Chinese culture you like at all. In particular the Manchu Empire had destroyed all forms of Taoism with the same expertise the Christians had deployed to scrub the last traces of paganism from European culture, in favour of a very standardized and westernized form of Confucianism.
The Great Awokening of America, on the other hand, is making the new American culture a pure object of ridicule even from those who adopt into it to facilitate their own careers in the corporate world. People who go to the Gulf countries may accept a superficial coating of Islamic habits but develop no respect for that religion that is just ever more ridiculous in its present form. People go there and don turbans and hijabs because the US petro-dollar is there, that’s it. Wokery is devaluing America together with the whole West and that is probably its main very purpose, namely to convince Westerners they are no longer first worlders but third worlders who can no longer afford to care about what they should say and think. On the other end of the American political spectrum Trumpism and associated forms of bad religion and neo-conservatism purport to the very same end : telling the most intelligent and enterprising that they no longer need apply in the world to come. The Chinese Cultural Revolution despite the horror it was was an opening parenthesis to an unknown future, while wokery is clearly a closing one on a par with American Evangelism. It namely tells that all progressive endeavours having enabled the West and even more the East to progress in the past are to be discarded as so many forms of racism in favour of the return of the most regressive cultural models from everywhere they can be found out in the world to bring back some kind of new dark age.
Is rather astonishing.
Thanks to raw data our meta-host has provided along with MIT Hillel, they're now down to a tenth of MIT's undergraduates, ~110 per class. We also hear bad top-line stuff about Caltech. I doubt things are much better at other top R1 schools and most don't teach well, and and a bachelor’s ticket you have to pay of is necessary to get your Ph.D. and then go further on the road.
I suppose a theoretical high energy physics breakthrough could come from someone outside of academia, although we'd have to put down string theory first or it would have to get the attention of someone big outside that cult. See for example Bose writing to Einstein after the former couldn't get published in the U.K. Rare examples like him and Chandrasekhar don't prove much for general populations or other individuals.
And that's before we get into how much mental energy has to be constantly exerted to not get canceled before you have a big result.Replies: @shale boi
I think it is easier t0 still make new discoveries in math than in physics.
It’s almost impossible to make experimental results without a lab, shop, training, etc. The days of Franklin flying kites are gone. This is excepting amateur astronomy where discoveries are still made. But I see this more like biological animal collecting or the like.
As far as theoretical results it’s hard for almost anyone (let alone outsiders) to make new discoveries. What was the last major new result? BCS? Standard Model? And the experiments that could drive new results all seem to require very high energies or the like. Climbing up an asymptote.
Probably the one area that shows as a clear opportunity would be explaining high temperature superconductivity (more than handwave-y D-wave comments).
Here’s an example of a (quasi) outsider making a big recent discovery in math:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang
Name any two big Gentile mathematicians of 20 or 21st century, without thinking? Youd have to think, or to be an expert metematician yourself.Replies: @notsaying, @bomag, @martin_2, @Dream
I was speaking about the post-Renaissance past in which due to their educations white men inevitably dominated science and mathematics. I sure do not know who the leading mathematicians of recent times are.
I would certainly count anyone Jewish as white.
They make some good matematicians, I have heard. And they are very Aryan.Replies: @notsaying
Society should encourage integrity and respect of others both past and present.Replies: @notsaying
That the system has been stacked in favor of white males and that whites did wrong in getting involved with slavery and colonizing and stealing land does not take anything away from the individual accomplishments of whites in science, math, literature and the arts.
People now and in the future will always stand up on the shoulders of white men. They got to many places first. That is just a fact. Hatred, resentment, disdain for our wrongdoings does not erase the accomplishments of individual white men.
That many educated white people want to pretend this isn’t true is very puzzling to me. But we live in an age in which many people want to insist their fantasy world is real because that is what they want. They do not admit objective facts and reality exist or treat it as a temporary inconvenience inflicted on them by the other side.
You mean, just like.... Muslims? ....Bantus? ...Han Chinese? ....Aztecs?
The blackbird whirled in the autumn wind.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
--StevensReplies: @Inverness
Trigonometry. “SOHCAHTOA”
https://www.unz.com/isteve/disparate-impact-law-reigns-over-canada/#comment-5079682 (#9)
I did a STEM subject at a university in the UK in the early 1980s. Very much whites only in my class and at my university other than the small number of actual overseas students.
I wasn`t a maths graduate, but because of my major I had to do a lot of maths classes.
In those days (certainly in the sticks) in the UK maths was a “clever boy” subject and doing a maths degree was a fairly common choice among intelligent boys unless they had a greater interest in say, physics, chemistry or engineering.
Essentially almost all the intelligent boys at my high school who went to university did STEM.
I only ever met about two people studying law before the age of 22. (It was not a subject taught at my university.)
I wonder what percentage of “clever white boys” do STEM in the UK now?
I am guessing the US had the same pattern, but STEM among whites ended even earlier.
“That the system has been stacked in favor of white males and that whites did wrong in getting involved with slavery and colonizing and stealing land”
You mean, just like…. Muslims? ….Bantus? …Han Chinese? ….Aztecs?
The blackbird whirled in the autumn wind.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
–Stevens
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Shakespeare (not a mathematician)
Look, everyone knows that calculus was invented by Leibniz’ African house servant long before it was invented by Newton’s African house servant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw9oX-kZ_9k
I guess I’d read the story wrong, Bill. I thought he was a math addicted murderer who made contributions in the field of meth production.
"methematics"
“servant”??
Amazingly, he became one of America’s greatest inventors without ever inventing anything the least bit important.
White Guilt and Black Science
https://www.newsweek.com/white-guilt-black-science-opinion-1748199Replies: @WowJustWow
I had been wondering for quite a while how Newsweek is still allowed to publish stuff like this in the Current Year. It looks like after many changes in ownership, it’s now privately owned by just two guys.
Maybe instead of “go woke, go broke” the warning to entrepreneurs should be “go public, go woke”.
This looks pretty woke, for mathematics…
Hmmm... Wasting in what sense? I don't think there are lots of people given insufficient education to achieve their potential in the US.
If anything, I would argue the opposite is true. We push too many people to stay in school too long, for overly academic degrees, and have too many worthless white-collar careers. Mid-level minds are great, productive people, but not when we treat them as academics.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
Perhaps I should be more clear: What I see is that our math curriculum here is deficient at the elementary school level and thus then into high school. Our more capable children are not exposed to levels of math at the early ages when they should be, and they are not given enough practice.
Also, because of our sacred illusions of “equality,” our more talented students languish with the average and stupid ones, whereas some other countries do a better job of separating students on different tracks.
Thus, many Amercans end up deficient, wasting the important early years of mental development and also getting soft from lack of mathematical exercise. For example, American high school students suck at factoring polynomials, simply because they were not exposed to them early enough and they were not made to do this task repeatedly and often from a younger age.
I am not advocating advancing people along with useless degrees in fluff and giving them the fantasy that they are academics, which is what we do.
Ok, I understand your argument. I don't agree that it's a significant problem, but it's certainly plausible, and I don't claim any broad knowledge that makes my position particularly reliable.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
Science. Must. Fall.
LOL
I suppose it lets the Woke know who to hate.
Quine so.
https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9781416597612-us.jpg
As will this excellent read?
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51VwpgMQVUL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgReplies: @Anonymous, @Bardon Kaldian
Bell is the Suetonius of math history and I mean that as a good thing.
Mathematics is a blood sport where only the best survive. Anyone is free to play, but without the necessary skills, winning is not guaranteed. The barriers to entry are very low as proven by Srinivasa Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan. He made great contributions to mathematics in spite of his much less than privileged background.Replies: @bomag, @Bill P, @Prester John, @Ancient Briton, @Anonymous, @AndrewR
It was his evil Aryan genes that allowed him to do that
Name any two big Gentile mathematicians of 20 or 21st century, without thinking? Youd have to think, or to be an expert metematician yourself.Replies: @notsaying, @bomag, @martin_2, @Dream
I suspect you are basing this off of Math Olympiad team pictures. The very leading edge of math in recent times has been men of European extraction: Conway; Wiles; Hamilton; Thurston; Borcherds. Look at the list of Abel prize winners; Fields medals.
All sciences have Europeans at the front. Something there about Western inventiveness and creativity. The media downplays it for Reasons.
Still some gas in the tank. But, as another commenter asked, are we raising any more? And can we find them if we do?
Gauss was not like that - Euler was, a little ---- and Newton, the most famous mathematician in the English-speaking world, was remembered (rightly or wrongly) by some of his contemporaries as the sort of person who never had a friend and never realized it is wrong not to want to have a friend.Just saying - the dislike people have for mathematicians of old is not simply what you might think it is.
Many mathematicians of old deserved the pity and contempt of their fellow humans, as they did not understand that their lack of understanding and their lack of empathy for others was not a good thing.Replies: @bomag
You have revealed one of the secrets of Western ascendance: putting up with socially awkward people.
True diversity and inclusion in action.
You observation has consequences in today's Clown World we've been discussing lately, plus see the now classic Twitter before and after Elon pictures. Repurposing a previous comment to Unz.com and probably iSteve, made years ago so I had to update both links:
The biggest objection to "incels" and other less than 80% sexual marketplace value (SMV) men is that for women involuntary interactions with them is "literally" rape, as "literally" is used today. Jim formerly of Jim's blog puts it in his usual rhetoric first, fact secondary style WRT to codes of conduct, and quotes the more insightful Spandrel:I strongly suggest reading the Spandrel link, he pointed out back in 2018 why incels had suddenly become a big "threat" using his Bioleninist framework; TL;DR they're organizing as a class, which for people like them is just not allowed.Replies: @bomag
Name any two big Gentile mathematicians of 20 or 21st century, without thinking? Youd have to think, or to be an expert metematician yourself.Replies: @notsaying, @bomag, @martin_2, @Dream
This is manifestly untrue. There are countless renowned European mathematicians from the twentieth century. You must be trolling.
Check who is the husband of Piper Harron, the renowned mathematical decolonizer of our time.
No, Europeans do not dominate anything there, save the English Don everyone hates.Replies: @James Speaks
No, I thought about the polynomials as well until I figured that no one would bother with learning something about a person simply because a theorem is named after them. Neither am I sure whether or not it matters that a theorem is named after Legendre when in most standard textbooks, the theorem is followed by Chebyshev polynomials and other theorems named after more obscure mathematicians. Theorems named after L’Hospital, Lagrange, Laplace, Cauchy abound and yet, I would class all of them as obscure figures.
In any case, the point that I’m trying to make is the following:
Everyone knows Einstein but did you ever hear of Lorentz? You know Gauss but you probably don’t know Legendre etc.
More importantly, during the last few decades, the cult of the prodigy child/prodigy mathematician has genuinely ruined the field. And judging from what I’ve heard and what, for example, Perelman has also said, mathematicians copy from each other all the time. Our little prodigy child Tao Terence has under-delivered and just like Erdös seems completely incapable in doing anything in mathematics without the help of 10 other mathematicians, but it won’t stop people from claiming that we have a new theorem related to prime numbers thanks solely to Tao Terence (forgetting the 20 other mathematicians involved in the project). I’m so glad I left that field.
Actually not quite. Group nouns like “company” and “team” are indeed construed as plural in British English.
But the word “maths” is simply short for “mathematics” which (despite ending with an ‘s’) is construed as singular on both sides of the Atlantic. As with the word “politics” for example.
So it’s a different rule in effect.
You mean, just like.... Muslims? ....Bantus? ...Han Chinese? ....Aztecs?
The blackbird whirled in the autumn wind.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
--StevensReplies: @Inverness
You are beginning to impress me with your knowledge of modern poetry.
True diversity and inclusion in action.Replies: @Inverness, @That Would Be Telling
Yes indeed, it takes all kinds. Knowing what we do about Newton, is it really that hard to imagine that he had trouble tolerating others?
> Thus, many Americans end up deficient, wasting the important early years of mental development
Ok, I understand your argument. I don’t agree that it’s a significant problem, but it’s certainly plausible, and I don’t claim any broad knowledge that makes my position particularly reliable.
When I studied my wife's old textbooks, I realized how much I could have learned and practiced and become proficient with at the same age as she had. I think there must be many thousands of Americans like me who were similarly malnourished in mathematics.
It IS big, and it is a shame, especially when considered alongside all of the efforts to coddle and promote and teach and teach and teach intellectually inferior children in America. It is a disgrace that makes me angry when I think about it.Replies: @megabar, @HammerJack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14Replies: @bomag
They say a picture speaks a thousand words.
That video speaks a thousand years.
“The relationship between math/mathematicians and philosophy/philosophers has been close.”
I think you mean, “used to be close.”
Read any contemporary philosophy lately? If we tried to engineer airplanes or cars using math based on modern-day philosophy, we would all walk. And just *say* we were flying.
The charitable view of the piece is that Others have been left behind, so we need to gather them to our bosom for math nurturing so they will have equal representation in the nomenclature contest.
Presumes that All Men Are Created Equal, so any difference in outcome must be discussed at length in the journals of our time.
Otherwise, it’s the usual current plan of the Left: find where demographics skew for the bad guys; call for change that installs their troops.
I would certainly count anyone Jewish as white.Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum
Hmm. Would you then count Iranians as White? Why not?
They make some good matematicians, I have heard. And they are very Aryan.
They certainly are not Asian or Black.Replies: @Dream
lllReplies: @Intelligent Dasein, @68W58
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinton_Rowan_Helper
All sciences have Europeans at the front. Something there about Western inventiveness and creativity. The media downplays it for Reasons.
Still some gas in the tank. But, as another commenter asked, are we raising any more? And can we find them if we do?Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum
I certainly do go by the Olympiads!
Thanks for pointig to the Fields medalists list as a good source for the said centuries. Really, though, lets not be purists in the sense of the Talmudic law, and count all memzers like Grothendicks and Borcherds’ as Jews they are, and there goes your Fields list.
The only surprise there: many Japanese.
I would love to see a bridge, skyscraper or airplane be designed using “mathematx.”
Grigori Perelman? Is that you? Welcome to the board!
A running joke is that the way to show science discoveries is graduate students doing the work; the professor comes in, pushes them out of the way, and takes credit.
Highlights that much of Science is a group effort. A field advances; gets pretty close to a discovery; a talented person comes along and makes the last hard push to a reveal; gets his name on the thing.
Science is always an effort of single free person. But many helpers work as technicians. Skilled mechanics, in Aristitotles terms. They are just helpers.
Thats why powers that be hate Science so much and have so much effort put into AI/ML.Replies: @bomag
AI will generate its own data.
Many examples of population quality bringing forth more knowledge than population quantity.Replies: @China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms
Yes, of course data quality matters. ChatGPT answers:
True diversity and inclusion in action.Replies: @Inverness, @That Would Be Telling
anon[184] is at least partly right about mathematicians from my own data gathered at MIT.
You observation has consequences in today’s Clown World we’ve been discussing lately, plus see the now classic Twitter before and after Elon pictures. Repurposing a previous comment to Unz.com and probably iSteve, made years ago so I had to update both links:
The biggest objection to “incels” and other less than 80% sexual marketplace value (SMV) men is that for women involuntary interactions with them is “literally” rape, as “literally” is used today. Jim formerly of Jim’s blog puts it in his usual rhetoric first, fact secondary style WRT to codes of conduct, and quotes the more insightful Spandrel:
I strongly suggest reading the Spandrel link, he pointed out back in 2018 why incels had suddenly become a big “threat” using his Bioleninist framework; TL;DR they’re organizing as a class, which for people like them is just not allowed.
Key question is, still, how to get our higher achieving women to reproduce. Enforced monogamy would help, but we seem to have lost that battle. We're falling back on pure instinct, or enough rational thought to override the tingles.
Does no one find it ironic they chose to go after Gauss?
https://thenewamerican.com/the-genocide-of-dead-white-males/
Or rather, find someone who has gone through a demanding education, and pay them (peanuts) to do the job.
Come on fellahs!
Gauss = German = Nazi = Racist.
Nuff said.
Ok, I understand your argument. I don't agree that it's a significant problem, but it's certainly plausible, and I don't claim any broad knowledge that makes my position particularly reliable.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
Well, it was a significant problem for me, a “gifted” student who was thus robbed of early development of mathematical strength.
When I studied my wife’s old textbooks, I realized how much I could have learned and practiced and become proficient with at the same age as she had. I think there must be many thousands of Americans like me who were similarly malnourished in mathematics.
It IS big, and it is a shame, especially when considered alongside all of the efforts to coddle and promote and teach and teach and teach intellectually inferior children in America. It is a disgrace that makes me angry when I think about it.
Where do you think the problem was in your school? My schools didn't do anything out of the ordinary (or so I thought); we worked problems in class and were given exercises, and this seemed sufficient.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
“mathamphetamine”
“methematics”
I managed to wade through the article, skimming it mostly. I don’t think modern mathematics has found a number high enough to count the number of woke cliches in this piece. Nature used to be the world’s premier science journal. This is a disgrace, and an ongoing disgrace at that.
They make some good matematicians, I have heard. And they are very Aryan.Replies: @notsaying
Sure Iranians are white.
They certainly are not Asian or Black.
“… the accomplishments of people of other genders and races have often been pushed aside,..”
I look forward to them inventing the wheel in a few years, when that ‘history’ is written for everyone by non-Goy AI.
https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9781416597612-us.jpg
As will this excellent read?
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51VwpgMQVUL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgReplies: @Anonymous, @Bardon Kaldian
The guy left to Newton looks like Adam Sandler.
Gauss looks like Edward G. Robinson after cosmetic surgery.
Hmmm…they go after the best:
https://thenewamerican.com/the-genocide-of-dead-white-males/
Ok, lets be more mathematical here. I did not say “there were no Europeans mathematicians” . I have said that they do not dominate the field. And it is true, check the Math olympiads , check the Fields medalists. Check the Early Life sections.
Check who is the husband of Piper Harron, the renowned mathematical decolonizer of our time.
No, Europeans do not dominate anything there, save the English Don everyone hates.
Gauss = German = Nazi = Racist.
Nuff said.Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum
Cantor equals Singer equals Hazzan. What are you implying here?
A running joke is that the way to show science discoveries is graduate students doing the work; the professor comes in, pushes them out of the way, and takes credit.
Highlights that much of Science is a group effort. A field advances; gets pretty close to a discovery; a talented person comes along and makes the last hard push to a reveal; gets his name on the thing.Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum
Nothing of the sort. Intellect is a single persons gift, like a womb in a bio front bole. A BFH cannot bump other BFH out of pregnancy and take it in.
Science is always an effort of single free person. But many helpers work as technicians. Skilled mechanics, in Aristitotles terms. They are just helpers.
Thats why powers that be hate Science so much and have so much effort put into AI/ML.
But if one makes a leap that brings forth molybdenum disulfide, they are building on quite a bit of chemistry that came before.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” -- NewtonReplies: @Thelma Ringbaum
When I studied my wife's old textbooks, I realized how much I could have learned and practiced and become proficient with at the same age as she had. I think there must be many thousands of Americans like me who were similarly malnourished in mathematics.
It IS big, and it is a shame, especially when considered alongside all of the efforts to coddle and promote and teach and teach and teach intellectually inferior children in America. It is a disgrace that makes me angry when I think about it.Replies: @megabar, @HammerJack
> I think there must be many thousands of Americans like me who were similarly malnourished in mathematics.
Where do you think the problem was in your school? My schools didn’t do anything out of the ordinary (or so I thought); we worked problems in class and were given exercises, and this seemed sufficient.
https://phys.org/news/2020-05-inmate-math-discoveries.htmlReplies: @stari_momak
It’s so great that the mathematician that helped him out is Italian…and named Umberto! Just seems right some how.
A whole ‘nother meaning for ‘degaussing’ .
When I studied my wife's old textbooks, I realized how much I could have learned and practiced and become proficient with at the same age as she had. I think there must be many thousands of Americans like me who were similarly malnourished in mathematics.
It IS big, and it is a shame, especially when considered alongside all of the efforts to coddle and promote and teach and teach and teach intellectually inferior children in America. It is a disgrace that makes me angry when I think about it.Replies: @megabar, @HammerJack
The really sad thing, in my view, is that this is now becoming vastly worse, and that the practices have spread through much of higher education as well.
If it hadn’t been for “tracking” much of school would have been unbearable for me and many others, here and elsewhere.
Where I live the public schools are busy eliminating anything that even vaguely resembles tracking (never mind “gifted student” programs, which no one even dares mention any more).
In their place, of course, we are dumbing down the entire curriculum so that semi-retarded students can get As in every class, as God surely intended.
GreatSchools and similar services are helping mightily, with their ratings contingent upon “measures of equity” such as: for every white student that gets a good grade, a black student must also, else the teacher had better explain why—at risk of her job.
And of course for every POC student who is disciplined or (God forbid) suspended…etc etc.
People think this is justified. Reasons.
They certainly are not Asian or Black.Replies: @Dream
Indians are white too, then.
Grothendieck is half Jewish. Borcherds is not Jewish at all.
Name any two big Gentile mathematicians of 20 or 21st century, without thinking? Youd have to think, or to be an expert metematician yourself.Replies: @notsaying, @bomag, @martin_2, @Dream
Majority of Fields medallists are non-Jewish white.
Out of 64 Fields medallists, there are 13 Jews and two half Jews. 2 Indians and 3 Chinese have won the medal.
Where do you think the problem was in your school? My schools didn't do anything out of the ordinary (or so I thought); we worked problems in class and were given exercises, and this seemed sufficient.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
We did the same things you did, it sounds like, but my wife’s classes were two years ahead of mine for the same age, and the exercises were deeper and more thorough. Her old textbooks show it, and she has explained it.
It’s even hard to directly compare, because the way mathematical categories were integrated there was different.
Various math subjects were introduced and intertwined earlier and all along the way, not separated the way ours were. For example, we didn’t have a geometry class until 9th grade, and we were the fast track. Also, our school stuck that year of geometry by itself in between algebra I and algebra II, so that by the time we got back to algebra again, we had not had practice with it for a year.
In her schools, geometry was often present alongside algebra, where appropriate, from at least 6th grade, and algebra was constantly being used and worked and practiced. They just worked more problems all along the way. Practice mattered. Exercise mattered, and they did more of it than we did.
Math was an ongoing part of school for her, with more and deeper problems to do, so that they developed more strength at working algebraically. American students get to calculus and still aren’t very good at working out the algebra. She and her classmates were already well-practiced by that time and could focus more of the calculus itself.
As for tracking, in her country, you tested to get into the high school you wanted, and your grades up to that point were considered. If you had shown aptitude for something like math, you went to the right school alongside other kids who could keep up with you instead of slowing you down. That was just normal there, rather than some special program or school the way it was and has been here when it has even existed at all.
If you can construct a program that allows more kids to tap in to their potential, and their future interests, without imposing unnecessary stress, irreversible decision points, and reduction in quality of their childhood, and without imposing excessive costs to our education system, I would support it.
And I don't mean that in a dismissive "you ask for the impossible" way. I could imagine a few ways to do it, myself. But I do think the current approach to increase education is failing on every metric that I listed, and so my knee-jerk reaction to attempts to educate more is negative.
2. I routinely get into arguments with the "rigor pushers" in the Internet math world, who want to push harder texts that are applicable to a very small subset of students. (A better solution is tracking, etc.)
3. It can be easy to advocate a harder text, but even for bright kids it may be better in retrospect, than at the time. Feynman physics lectures were a failure compared to doing Halliday and Resnik. They just work better in retrospect (and were enjoyed by teachers and grad students), but not by students new to the topic. And for that matter, Feynman, even while often advocating taking a fresh look at things, also saw the benefit in a standard curriculum at times.
4. Hyman Rickover had an interesting perspective that gifted children are better served by acceleration than enrichment. It was and is a bit of a contrarian perspective. But you can see how moving on to calculus might be more "bang for the buck" than learning how to solve cubics.
When someone writes an piece of writing he/she keeps
the idea of a user in his/her mind that how a user can know it.
Thus that’s why this paragraph is amazing. Thanks!
You observation has consequences in today's Clown World we've been discussing lately, plus see the now classic Twitter before and after Elon pictures. Repurposing a previous comment to Unz.com and probably iSteve, made years ago so I had to update both links:
The biggest objection to "incels" and other less than 80% sexual marketplace value (SMV) men is that for women involuntary interactions with them is "literally" rape, as "literally" is used today. Jim formerly of Jim's blog puts it in his usual rhetoric first, fact secondary style WRT to codes of conduct, and quotes the more insightful Spandrel:I strongly suggest reading the Spandrel link, he pointed out back in 2018 why incels had suddenly become a big "threat" using his Bioleninist framework; TL;DR they're organizing as a class, which for people like them is just not allowed.Replies: @bomag
Jim’s blog is still active. I follow both him and Spandrel off and on.
Key question is, still, how to get our higher achieving women to reproduce. Enforced monogamy would help, but we seem to have lost that battle. We’re falling back on pure instinct, or enough rational thought to override the tingles.
That’s all reasonable. I just see it differently, or perhaps we use different language to say the same things.
If you can construct a program that allows more kids to tap in to their potential, and their future interests, without imposing unnecessary stress, irreversible decision points, and reduction in quality of their childhood, and without imposing excessive costs to our education system, I would support it.
And I don’t mean that in a dismissive “you ask for the impossible” way. I could imagine a few ways to do it, myself. But I do think the current approach to increase education is failing on every metric that I listed, and so my knee-jerk reaction to attempts to educate more is negative.
1. You can always have regrets or wonders over what you could have learned better. Part of it is the opportunity given to you, but also part is on you. Nothing stopping you from going to the ‘brary. Like an actual brick building (and if you didn’t have a good one, there is/was ILL…great system…few use it and the brarians grumble when I invoke it…but it works awesome.)
2. I routinely get into arguments with the “rigor pushers” in the Internet math world, who want to push harder texts that are applicable to a very small subset of students. (A better solution is tracking, etc.)
3. It can be easy to advocate a harder text, but even for bright kids it may be better in retrospect, than at the time. Feynman physics lectures were a failure compared to doing Halliday and Resnik. They just work better in retrospect (and were enjoyed by teachers and grad students), but not by students new to the topic. And for that matter, Feynman, even while often advocating taking a fresh look at things, also saw the benefit in a standard curriculum at times.
4. Hyman Rickover had an interesting perspective that gifted children are better served by acceleration than enrichment. It was and is a bit of a contrarian perspective. But you can see how moving on to calculus might be more “bang for the buck” than learning how to solve cubics.
I heard of Lorentz. He’s covered in pop science YT videos that explain relativity development. Don’t know more than that…but definitely heard of him. I have to think Einstein did more. Not just relativity but photoelectric effect, stat mech, and solid state physics.
And additionally the ability to develop inquiries on larger systems,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_program
and to ask questions, an entirely different endeavour from winning the Olympiads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems
Mozi had made headways in 4BCE but it fell by the wayside
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_in_China#The_repression_of_the_study_of_logic
Science is always an effort of single free person. But many helpers work as technicians. Skilled mechanics, in Aristitotles terms. They are just helpers.
Thats why powers that be hate Science so much and have so much effort put into AI/ML.Replies: @bomag
Yes, individuals have a singular greatness.
But if one makes a leap that brings forth molybdenum disulfide, they are building on quite a bit of chemistry that came before.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” — Newton
Are but choruses of the Deaf,
And quadruplegic Ballets", said a poeth.So one great mind can speak to other great mind, sure, but it does not make them a Collective Science at all.Replies: @bomag
But if one makes a leap that brings forth molybdenum disulfide, they are building on quite a bit of chemistry that came before.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” -- NewtonReplies: @Thelma Ringbaum
What about them Individuals? Please do not confuse the two threads: One is that Fields medals are dominated by the Individuals (people here counted 14 openly individuals per like, 20 years of the Medals; to me its a total domination of the Individuals over the Whites).
Another is that intellectual effort is always done by a single person, and never by a collective mind.
“Collective minds of many a Degenerate,
Are but choruses of the Deaf,
And quadruplegic Ballets”, said a poeth.
So one great mind can speak to other great mind, sure, but it does not make them a Collective Science at all.
Out of 64 Fields medallists, there are 13 Jews and two half Jews. 2 Indians and 3 Chinese have won the medal.Replies: @Thelma Ringbaum
No, youd have to count it right. Out of 20 years the medal was awarded, 14-15 obvious Individuals here, and not counting cryptoIndividuals. Its like modern Holliwood, youd have to have a gay black scientist on the cast or there be no movie.
The Field medal has been awarded for way longer than 20 years.
13 ethnic Jews and 2 half Jews have won the medal. No one cares what religion a Jew practises.
http://jinfo.org/Fields_Mathematics.html
Stop making stuff up about things you know nothing about.
Are but choruses of the Deaf,
And quadruplegic Ballets", said a poeth.So one great mind can speak to other great mind, sure, but it does not make them a Collective Science at all.Replies: @bomag
I counted back thirty years and it was roughly half and half, so I dispute your findings. But what of it? You indicated zero, now you’ve walked it back. You don’t know the field. You’ve bought into the Narrative that Euros have done nothing and can’t compete when the Other tries.
A large chunk of the most leading edge math in the last 30 years was done by Euros who didn’t get a Fields.
And, Individuals on the list get their skull power from European admixture.
Collectivism: not saying the best is done by committee, but people get help; advice; guidance. Ramanujan reached out to Hardy, who met with Littlewood; and the two decided to sponsor him. Newton was aided and guided by Halley’s awesome social skills; in addition to input from Christopher Wren and Robert Hooks and others.
The guy who solved the Fermat problem didn’t get a Fields because he was too old. (Fields is only for under-40s.)
They gave him a this-is-not-a-Fields-medal-but-it-should-have-been medal instead.
Check who is the husband of Piper Harron, the renowned mathematical decolonizer of our time.
No, Europeans do not dominate anything there, save the English Don everyone hates.Replies: @James Speaks
One von Neumann equals a googleplex of non Europeans. Or a Gibbs number. Which is to googleplex as infinity is the IQ of that wind up gerbil-of-color press secretary.