New Deep House release out now: d_Verge - Morning Light EP [Kynatix] Beatport
Apr-18-2012 01:34
Lagrangian
Suspended User
Registered: Feb 2012
Location: Mountain View, Santa Clara, California
quote:
Originally posted by Blake
My advanced calculus professor told us about this guy, a few weeks ago. Apparently he's not very well off financially, nor in any kind of position to be turning down $1,000,000. Looks like another case of an Autism Spectrum Disorder rearing its ugly head.
quote:
Decades before, in the Soviet Union, math placed a premium on logic and consistency in a culture that thrived on rhetoric and fear; it required highly specialized knowledge to understand; and, worst of all, mathematics lay claim to singular and knowable truths—when the regime had staked its own legitimacy on its own singular truth. (Ugh, please ignore the NY Times' rhetoric). All this made mathematicians suspect. Still, math escaped the purges, show trials and rule by decree that decimated other Soviet sciences.
Then there were those who could never join the establishment: those who happened to be born Jewish or female , those who had had the wrong advisers at university or those who could not force themselves to join the Party. For these people, "the most they could hope for was being able to defend their doctoral dissertation at some institute in Minsk, if they could secure connections there," says Sergei Gelfand, publisher of the American Mathematical Society—who also happens to be the son of one of Russia's top 20th-century mathematicians, Israel Gelfand, a student of Mr. Kolmogorov. Some Western mathematicians, Sergei Gelfand adds, "even came for an extended stay because they realized there were a lot of talented people. This was unofficial mathematics."[/B]
When it all collapsed, the state stopped investing in math and holding its mathematicians hostage. It's hard to say which of these two factors did more to send Russian mathematicians to the West, primarily the U.S., but leave they did, in what was probably one of the biggest outflows of brainpower the world has ever known.
But the math culture they find in America, while less back-stabbing than that of the Soviet math establishment, is far from the meritocratic ideal that Russia's unofficial math world had taught them to expect. American math culture has intellectual rigor but also suffers from allegations of favoritism, small-time competitiveness, occasional plagiarism scandals, as well as the usual tenure battles, funding pressures and administrative chores that characterize American academic life.
Mr. Perelman came to the United States as a young postdoctoral student in the early 1990s and immediately decided that America was math heaven; he wrote home demanding that his mother and his younger sister, a budding mathematician, move here. But three years later, when his postdoc hiatus was over and he was faced with the pressures of securing an academic position, he returned home, disillusioned.
Originally posted by Omega_Blue
winston i don't really have a problem with, he just had some serious breakdowns on the forums, and was friends with zild or something? he got invited slightly out of pity to a mutual friend's little 10-person NYE get-together that i was at and wouldn't acknowledge my existence for some reason, it was hilarious.
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Apr-18-2012 05:40
Lira
Ancient BassAddict
Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Brasilia, Brazil
quote:
Originally posted by Omega_Blue
winston i don't really have a problem with, he just had some serious breakdowns on the forums
Whatever happened to him?
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