/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11024688
>They're not smarter than you
rofl... my proff just showed a scatter plot of last semester mechanics of mat grades vs homework completion to show a correlation. It was positive of course but people who got A's spanned anywhere from doing all of the homework to half of the homework.

Is Tao a meme?

If his scholarly outputs don’t change much in substance from where they are now, nobody will remember his name 100 years from now, unlike say Andrew Wiles’, Grigori Perelman’s or Donald Knuth’s -to speak of somebody who is a computer scientist.

> inb4 green-tao
the work was join work with Ben Green, not Tao’s sole work. Second, this result is of a lower impact than say proving the twin prime conjecture -a problem that remains open. Yitang Zhang’s work got closer to the latter result than Tao’s and Tao knows it.

What is that we know today (e.g. in number theory) that we would not have known if Terry Tao had never been born? Not much really. On the other hand, one can make the claim that if Andrew Wiles had not been born, Fermat’s Last Theorem would still be a conjecture. Ditto of the Poincare conjecture and Perelman. That’s what we are talking about here.

When undergraduates study mathematics 100 years from now, based on the his current output, professors will say “Terry who???” because frankly he hasn’t produced any revolutionary result unlike Wiles or Perelman.

Compressed sensing for example was over-hyped among other reasons because Terry Tao co-wrote one of the seminal papers in the field, particularly after Terry Tao won the Fields Medal. A decade later, compressed sensing remains a curiosity that hasn’t found widespread usage because it is not a universal technique and it is very hard to implement in those applications where it is appropriate. Most practical sampling these days is done still via the Shannon theorem. If nothing dramatically changes in the long term, 100 years from now, compressed sensing will be a a footnote in the history of sampling.

His work in Navier-Stokes, same thing. As shown with the work of Grigori Perelman solving the Poincare conjecture, history remembers him, not Richard Hamilton’s work on the Ricci flow that was instrumental for Perelman.

I could go on, but you get the idea

>>9791684
fuck off brainlet