/sci/ - Science & Math

Math is dying. The way to save it is to make it useful, that is, to do APPLICATIONS OUTSIDE math.

Each talk on research in math should start by describing two nontrivial applications of the research to problems outside of math. The field sucks. Over the past few decade the whole field has shrunk: Few students enter the field; a big fraction of those leave; of those who stay, they have terrible lives. At most universities the math department is a joke. For the service courses in calculus, ODE, or linear algebra, other departments are eager to teach those. The deans are seeing there's no money here -- no students, no grants, no gifts, nothing. So, why keep up the department? So, the department can shrink. Largely the DoD, DoE, and NSF gave up. Being irrelevant has consequences.

The solution: Apply math to valuable solutions to problems outside math people will pay money for. Then can support math profs, get students to join the field, keep people in the field, look useful, get gifts, impress Congress again, get NSF funds, etc. Math used to try to be useful to physics, engineering, etc.
Math is STILL useful in many fields but that math is now mostly done OUTSIDE math departments because those departments threw out such work and pursued incomprehensible nonsense. When I was in math grad school the seminars I saw were awful. One guy had SERIOUS problems: For the first few seconds he faced the audience then turned to the board, started writing in the UL corner kept facing the board, kept his face within 1' of the board, and had involuntary muscle twitches. That may have been the last seminar I went to. He would have been better off with a job mowing grass, literally. Later I got a Ph.D. in applied math on stochastic optimal control. Pure math in places has some great stuff, very powerful for applications but then it gets lost. Some math journals finally said that correctness is no longer enough we also want relevance. They need also to say that they need applications.

actual shape of earth, crazy how nature do that

Earth is a giant doughnut, not a spinning ball or "oblate spheroid".

> But you can't see the other side of the world when you look up!
Because you're not in the part of the world where you can do that.

>>9518890
But the mug's walls have a certain width, so if you fatten them up you obtain a torus

>the average /sci/entist is too brainwashed to comprehend this