Re: What math grad school is like.

1

The relative activity on this vs the ATM thread would seem to support the hypothesis that math graduate school is less interesting than lesbian sex.


Posted by: AcademicLurker | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 10:27 AM
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Give it time, AL. In a hundred years, maybe this thread will be important to the burgeoning field of artificial goldfish habitats.


Posted by: snarkout | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 10:30 AM
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3

Sometimes I like to imagine what it's like to have math graduate school.


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 10:37 AM
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4

Penetrative.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 10:39 AM
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5

What is it like to be a bisected angle?


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 10:50 AM
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6

Honestly, that sounds really fun. Or maybe I'm just really bored.


Posted by: Mentioner | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:00 AM
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7

You don't really read about vacuum cleaners, Mentioner.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:04 AM
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Conceptual space abhors a vacuum.


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:09 AM
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9

I need to invent a new mathematical formula to indicate how many ways that entire post is banned.


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:11 AM
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10

The denouement of that is depressingly accurate. Also, the whole vacuum analogy reminds me of http://xkcd.com/1133/.


Posted by: Yawnoc | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:16 AM
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11

What's interesting is that this does nicely illustrate the differences between two fields where I can actually read technical papers. In biology papers the process is pretty well laid out to the extent that I think even less trained people can understand what's going on. In chemistry papers you really need to already know the underlying reactions of what's happening- they throw around so-called "named reactions" quite a lot with the assumption that you know that a Sonogashira coupling (kinky!) means that this plus that became this other thing through this mechanism. If you don't know that, trying to follow the illustrations doesn't make sense. In biology authors spell out much more explicitly what's going on.


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:23 AM
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I just started reading a paper whose title begins "A gentle tutorial" and whose first sentence is "Recall the definition of the maximum-likelihood estimation problem."

Ok! I can totally recall that.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:27 AM
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I working with MLE processes right now.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:28 AM
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14

Laydeez?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:28 AM
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15

Great! Can I give my present problem to you?


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:29 AM
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You probably know way more about it than I do.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:29 AM
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17

That's a pretty good description of graduate school in theoretical physics, and I think my students would say it's also good for the theoretical reaches of statistics and computer science.


Posted by: Cosma Shalizi | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:31 AM
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Hey, Cosma, you could probably do this thing I'm supposed to do in your sleep. Just sayin'!


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:33 AM
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15: Does it involve regression?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:37 AM
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It's true that I discount my consulting rates if the client will accept solutions that come to me in dreams.

(Oh, just e-mail me, it's got to be better than writing tomorrow's problem set.)


Posted by: Cosma Shalizi | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:38 AM
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That's a pretty good description of graduate school in theoretical physics

Has almost nothing in common with my experience, as far as I can tell.


Posted by: essear | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:55 AM
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22

Let me reiterate, essear, that we're not talking about literal vacuum cleaners.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:57 AM
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23

Because it doesn't mention airports and hotel wifi?


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:57 AM
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Still. I bet I could find some string theorists who say it sounds familiar.


Posted by: essear | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 11:57 AM
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23: God, my comments must be boring. I'm currently using wifi on a plane. For about five more minutes before my battery dies.


Posted by: essear | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 12:01 PM
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26

Nicely written.

Dealing with an unknown, as yet undescribed object with complex properties is a pretty common experience in science. Usually, clarifying how the thing works and when you can see it requires effort from people working with different tools. Problems compact enough to fit into one person's head are unusual. Reading about Barbara McClintock's work to identify transposons before sequencing existed is mindbending. Her face should be on the twenty.

This seems like an OK place to drop a link to this nice overview of a topic that I find pretty interesting, random matrices.


Posted by: lw | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 12:12 PM
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27

I have emailed you, Cosma.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 12:32 PM
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Math researchers ( users ?) take more words to describe pictures than CS folk.

Complete with regressions, plots, etc:

http://www.moneyscience.com/pg/blog/ThePracticalQuant/read/436565/beyond-bagofwords-using-markup-to-understand-how-science-is-written


Posted by: Econolicious | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 1:02 PM
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The other day I did have a student saying, basically, "My senior seminar paper will be all wrapped up if I can just figure out a formula for Bell Numbers", (except she didn't call them Bell numbers, obviously) . I admired her enthusiasm, but she was really not hearing what I was saying, when I told her that that was not going to happen by Friday.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 1:08 PM
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26.last: I don't know as much about random matrices as I should. Does anyone really understand why they work so well for nuclear physics? Or for the Riemann zeta zeros?


Posted by: essear | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 2:22 PM
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I thought that the connection was: the interactions for a linearized many-particle Hamiltonian can be approximated by a random matrix with suitable mean and variance.


Posted by: lw | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 2:32 PM
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Well, yeah, but: why? Is there some sense in which almost all matrices have spectra that look like random matrix spectra? Is this quantified? (Probably, I suppose.) But there are lots of other problems where the answers don't look like random matrices.

I guess I should read more-- I'm moderately familiar with random matrix ensembles but not with how you would know they apply to a given problem.


Posted by: essear | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 2:42 PM
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This is about right.

Has almost nothing in common with my experience also.


Posted by: James B. Shearer | Link to this comment | 11-29-12 7:58 PM
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