Re:An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Acade...
by fragmede on Thursday April 23, 2015 @02:47PM
(#9428927)
> ...mathematics was one of the few areas of study where one could noodle away ... with little ... infrastructure.
The New Yorker had an interesting article about Yitang Zhang and his discovery concerning bounded primes. The discovery itself is interesting for the mathematics involved, but of wider interest is that up until this discovery, he was a relative unknown in the mathematical establishment.
If it were simply a question of motivation and discipline to have math as a hobby, we would expect discoveries from unknown individuals more frequently, but, alas, that's not true, which is what makes this story precious.
It stems from the fact, among other things, that math isn't like programming. It's not like deciding, one day, that you want to write your own operating system, and then the small matter of coding it up. Math requires* those leaps of intuition that come to you after banging your head against the same problem for months. Most employers would start to question a developer's continued employment if it took them five months to resolve a single ticket.
The New Yorker had an interesting article about Yitang Zhang and his discovery concerning bounded primes. The discovery itself is interesting for the mathematics involved, but of wider interest is that up until this discovery, he was a relative unknown in the mathematical establishment.
If it were simply a question of motivation and discipline to have math as a hobby, we would expect discoveries from unknown individuals more frequently, but, alas, that's not true, which is what makes this story precious.
It stems from the fact, among other things, that math isn't like programming. It's not like deciding, one day, that you want to write your own operating system, and then the small matter of coding it up. Math requires* those leaps of intuition that come to you after banging your head against the same problem for months. Most employers would start to question a developer's continued employment if it took them five months to resolve a single ticket.
*http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/pursuit-beauty