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  • Funded positions are much less than PhD number. However, people can fund themselves with a job. In a country, if it's easy to to get a part-time job with enough payment, mathematicians can continue work.
    by txhwind
  • > Lying is a core part of communicating mathematics. We lie to kindergarteners when explaining fractions. We lie to fourth graders when approaching limits...

    Hard disagree.

    Lying is with intention to deceive.

    Teaching is simplifying with the intention that they understand and get the correct intuition.

    Math is not about lying, that's just silly.

    by emil-lp
  • Now chemistry on the other hand…

    OK there’s still no intent to deceive but almost all of the “rules” you learn have giant exceptions

    by cheesecakegood
  • I don’t remember us getting to fractions in kindergarten, but maybe the curriculum has radically changed since the early 70s.

    What exactly is the lie? 1/4 and 3/8 equals 5/8. Is there’s something more to that? Is that fundamentally wrong?

    by bananamogul
  • Terry Pratchett, The Science of Discworld:

    > As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children ('as much as they can understand') there are lies-to-bosses ('as much as they need to know') lies-to-patients ('they won't worry about what they don't know') and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves.

    > Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. 'Yes, but you needed to understand that,' they are told, 'so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true.'

    > Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored.

    by Terr_
  • That was well-written and interesting, thanks!
    by karmakurtisaani
  • This author has a natural talent for writing. That was interesting throughout.
    by dmix
  • Related: Does one have to be a genius to do maths?

    https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...

    by arunix
  • He's right, of course, for those people who already have a mathematical gift, but the problem with that is that Tao has never experienced not being a mathematical genius, and is no more capable of understanding what it's like to not be a genius as an ordinary person is capable of understanding what it's like to be one.
    by lambdaone
  • As a middle-aged mathematician, AI is provoking a serious crisis among the better mathematicians I know. Many are only half jokingly talking about retiring. We use AI a lot in research already and it's obvious that whoever doesn't will fall behind fast. At the very least it gives access to the full library in a few minutes, serving as a kind of knowledge oracle generally more useful than the expert who ought to be in the office next door but isn't. And we see what can happen when it is effectively coupled with lean to automate theorem proving and discovery.

    We aren't dumb enough to see this as the end of the profesión - Esther it's clearly a shift in how we will work - but we like doing computations and playing around with examples and how one does that just changed a lot. The other problem is we know we don't have the energy of youth to learn to use AI as effectively as the kids, although we are wiser and have better judgment and do know some things.

    Mathematicians who are not taking seriously how to adapt to AI are deluding themselves.

    by contubernio
  • > My physicist friend once asked me what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything in my dissertation in a tenth of the time. I answered by pointing out that Terence Tao didn’t. Terence Tao did not find a small open problem posited by my advisor and publish a bite sized result making incremental progress. He has only so much time and so many other fish to fry.

    This reminds me of a post I saw recently, although I can't remember the platform. It said something along the lines of assessing the limits of AI by finding the dumbest questions it can't solve. I think that pairs well as an additional way to view meaning through one's work.

    The linked post points out constrained attention as a way to bring meaning to novel work that no one else took on. With AI, this can still be applied to compute.

    I'm just wondering if there are a class of problems that humans, at least in the short-term, where humans need to be in the loop to solve more efficiently.

    by derangedHorse
  • > My physicist friend once asked me what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything in my dissertation in a tenth of the time.

    That's really mean thing to say

    by azan_
  • I have just started reading this Gates Notes about reserving some jobs for humans:

    https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-c...

    by pdm55
  • > what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything

    A similar question is now being asked: what is the point of doing research, etc. if something like AI can figure out everything?

    The question betrays the parochial way in which many people think about knowledge. For them, knowledge is merely an instrument or an effect. It does not occur to them that knowing is a valuable thing in itself, that understanding is valuable and desirable. Yes, some knowledge has merely practical value, but theoretical knowledge is primarily sought for its own sake, because we desire to know reality.

    So, even if Terrence Tao, an AI agent, or who or whatever arrives at some bit of new knowledge, it doesn't benefit you as a knowing subject unless you understand it yourself and make it your own.

    by lo_zamoyski
  • It's interesting that this piece stands well enough if you replace mathematics with probably any other intellectual profession, including software development or pretty much anything else.

      And, I lie to anyone who asks me why I’m a mathematician.
  It is much easier to claim “I love learning the laws of life,”
  while literally handwaving, than it is for me to flashback to
  the twenty or so pivotal moments that lead to me walking out
  of Gainesville with a PhD in Arithmetic Geometry.
    Since “normal” people mostly don't understand what the software development job is about, handwaving in response to regular questions: “what do you do at work?”, “what do you like about your job?” – is pretty normal. I think that most of us have some prepared answers ready to use.

      Mathematics is the thing you try to understand, don’t,
  get frustrated about, and then do.
    Just like the software development. I truly believe that the only people who can survive a software job are those who can tolerate the constant feeling of frustration caused by things not working or breaking for random reasons, and persevere in this environment to do the things you need to do.
    by ventana
  • > “what do you like about your job?”

    For software development, normal people will just assume it's money and probably not even ask...

    by marcosdumay
  • > constant feeling of frustration caused by things not working or breaking for random reasons

    That’s not a feature of software development, but a feature of working higher up in the stack and/or interfacing with lower-quality external systems. I am lucky to have been working on relatively self-contained systems for most of my career, where that experience hasn’t been a constant.

    by layer8
  • > And, I lie to anyone who asks me why I’m a mathematician.

    I prefer to say "I liked a girl" (because it's the truth)

    by bananaflag
  • A PhD in Arithmetic Geometry and a publication in a top tier journal is hardly mediocre in and of itself, as far the author is concerned. The equivalent for a software engineer is probably a leading AI engineer, with a strong publication count. I think a lot of people who are not mediocre are unaware of what mediocrity actually is. Yeah if you're only in the top .1% and comparing yourself to the literal best in the world, you will feel mediocre in that sense . A mid mathematician maybe publication in worse journals, teaching community college.
    by paulpauper
  • > We're all frustration addicts. We just want to bang our heads against problems we don't yet know how to solve.

    I've been tapering off AI lately. I think I've realized that conquering the struggle is the fun part, and accomplishments just don't hit the same if AI is smoothing over every friction and cordoning off all the pitfalls and rabbit-holes.

    by randusername
  • I hate struggling. I hate the realization that comes after the struggle about how easy was the problem I tried to solve. I hate realizing that I only reduced the number of problems from infinity + 1 to infinity, and have to do it again, forever.

    Yet I also hate when I get away from solving problems and feel like I'm wasting my life with nothing to show for it.

    by torginus
  • As an ex-academic (not mathematician), this really resonates. Every generation of researchers has to outperform the researcher generation before them - there are fully tenured profs out there who, with their track record, wouldn't get a postdoc nowadays. It's just a ratchet where every generation has to be more outstanding than the previous one, so yeah, you suddenly need 'triple the conferences'. Eventually that ratcheting reflects on your self-worth and you start calling yourself mediocre, even though you vastly outperform the previous generation. It's an extremely unfair game designed by careless people.

    Throw AI into the mix and your self-worth crashes. Just today I saw a Claude Science set of results that made my own work of the past 2 months completely superfluous, and I sit here and wonder what's the point.

    by a_bonobo
  • > Just today I saw a Claude Science set of results that made my own work of the past 2 months completely superfluous

    Could you share more about that?

    by perching_aix
  • All research and progress boils down to Brownian Loop Soup. Someone/something having a result showing a connection does not mean they have explored "the way" to do it.

    Not even the most elegant mathematically perfect solution is guaranteed to be the best way to crack a problem, or provide a definite answer.

    Meandering paths through whatever we set our minds to do and serendipity is the way of human beings for the past few hundred millennia.

    by photonemitter
  • Really enjoyable read. I escaped a career in Mathematics by being sufficiently bad at it that I only have a Masters. Fortunately, I escaped to a field immune to AI: CS and then a software engineering career. Well, not really, but I did get a good 15 years out of it so thank god for that.

    About half of my friends are founders of various startups and the rest are executives of and almost all of them have the view that it’s better for everything to be a failure than to be in the “it could make it” category for half a decade or more.

    In that way, I am glad I found that it wasn’t for me. I had the curiosity, but not the doggedness to face difficulty (not enough curiosity perhaps?) or the ability to not encounter such difficulty. And fortunately that meant I was never in the “I could make it” category. God bless clear and present boundaries and may the devil take the grey zone.

    by arjie
  • grey failure is the worst, not dead, not alive and no clear signal.
    by genxy
  • Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be about three years out. I honestly don’t know how to guide my 12-year-old son who loves math¹ and coding.

    ⸻

    1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rational number without any guidance at all.²

    2. I want to see how close to the general solution he’s gotten on his own, but given that he’s not had any formal algebra, it’s damned impressive and bodes well for his future development.

    by dhosek