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Re:What do grad students in math do all day? by SilasX on Saturday March 16, 2013 @10:52PM (#5387860)
If they're so smart, why aren't they any better at bringing newcomers up to speed?
Re:What do grad students in math do all day? by omaranto on Saturday March 16, 2013 @11:56PM (#5388052)
Some thing are hard no matter how you try to explain them. There's lots of stuff that seems to require working through it yourself to understand.
Re:What do grad students in math do all day? by SilasX on Monday March 18, 2013 @07:31PM (#5397867)
Oh, I don't disagree; some topics are inherently intractable. It's just that, in all my experiences, the numbers are more like 1 truly intractable topic for every thousand that some expert will mistakenly claim is intractable simply because they haven't put the effort into tracing out the connections to other topics.

The woman top row of this xkcd pretty much sums up my life:

http://xkcd.com/566/

Re:What do grad students in math do all day? by thomaslee on Sunday March 17, 2013 @12:05AM (#5388080)
Probably because it's hard to distill years of work connecting the dots (which at first don't appear to be connected in an obvious way) in a way that is easily digestable by somebody new to the field.

In any case, I imagine there's more glory in digging further into intellectual stuff than spending time making it palatable for newbies. :)

Re:What do grad students in math do all day? by devb on Sunday March 17, 2013 @12:13PM (#5389688)
It's the newcomers' faults, clearly.