/sci/ - Science & Math

A numberphile video

Prolific user of math stack overflow

>>11384481
lol I wasn't aware of that

the green-tao theorem.

>>11384488
>the sequence of prime numbers contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions
So why is this important and not just a mathematical factoid

>>11384471

https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/preprints/cv.html

>>11384487
I literally have more SO reputation than him

>>11384534
Me too, but the question he answers are typically deeper and more sophisticated.

>>11384494
>the sequence of prime numbers contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions
What does that mean, anon.

>>11384503
A publication is not the same as accomplishing something relevant in global terms

>>11384542
That you can find sequences like 8, 15, 22, 29, 36 or 10, 13, 16, 19 (the difference between two consecutive elements is always the same) of arbitrary length where all elements in the sequence are prime

That's a factoid to me

Has he done anything groundbreaking? On the level of Galois or Grothiendeck for example?
The media talks a lot about him, but I don't know anything he's done.
Edumacate us /sci/

>>11384487
>101 rep on Scifi & Fantasy

lol he probably has been lurking that site for a year but hasn't had enough courage to ask the first question.

>>11384471
He has a blogpost

>>11384547
it's not a factoid, it's a fact.

>>11384471
Can you unironically find a single mathematician (let alone pure mathematician) with this much citations by engineers/scientists?
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TFx_gLQAAAAJ&hl=en

and it's not even something he cares too much about.


Anyone here applying to be his student? don't be shy guys!

>>11384544
>accomplishing something relevant in global terms
>>11384558
>Has he done anything groundbreaking?
I'm sorry, but who the fuck are you to doubt the entire STEM field? Publications are accomplishments, they're the only relevant metric by which science is judged, people lose their jobs if they don't publish enough. If you aren't publishing multiple articles a year, you're obviously doing nothing, a scientist that publishes 5 articles a year is obviously better than a scientist that publishes 1 a year.

>>11384588
>factoid: a brief or trivial item of news or information

brief: check
trivial: check (hard to prove, but trivial in its meaning and implications)
information: check

>>11384606
>Publications are accomplishments, they're the only relevant metric by which science is judged, people lose their jobs if they don't publish enough. If you aren't publishing multiple articles a year, you're obviously doing nothing, a scientist that publishes 5 articles a year is obviously better than a scientist that publishes 1 a year.
Kys Chang.

>>11384547
sequences in sequences?
what do you mean?

you take a sequence of numbers in 10 based number system, and then you take digits, and then you put whitespaces between digits to create another sequence?

>>11384606
>Publications are accomplishments, they're the only relevant metric by which science is judged, people lose their jobs if they don't publish enough
I have publications, and still think it's bullshit. It's not because some random referee aproved something semi-relevant that you wrote that some progress was made in science at all.

There is this prevailing belief that lots of small progress will turn into large progress over time, but in reality all it does is create a mass of people desperate to publish who don't even think about what they are doing, don't express something they genuinely want to share with the community in their papers and get caught in an orthodox loop where you don't want to publish anything too different from what everyone is saying because that will not lead to citations.

Science is stuck and not getting anywhere because of this "publication = accomplishment" mindset. Better publish 1 paper that means something than 100 that do not

>>11384635
Like

8, 9, 10, 15, 17, 19, 22, 29, 30, 36

The sequence 8, 15, 22, 29, 36 is contained in that sequence, and is an arithmetic progression

more than you OP lmao

>>11384638
Half of all publications don't see a citation in 5 years and of those who do, half are self-citations. You could say science is on the rise since there have never been more publications, but no one is reading them, they're just mass publications to meet career requirements.
Scientists have been warning of this direction for decades but the money doesn't really care, it's the easiest metric they can measure and get funding by, the alternative is actually reading all this shit and judging it by its merits and that's just worst case scenario.

>>11384649
>>11384638
But Terrence Tao's publications are not comparable to the publications you guys talk about.
They actually lead to new field and impact people's lives (if you go to the hospital and use MRI scan for your rectal cancers you should thank him)

>>11384658
Do you really think engineers read papers by Tao to build those things. They just tinker 1000 times with the machine and software until it does what it is supposed to. Bottom up, not top down

Would be glad to hear if you have any evidence of the contrary though

>>11384649
science is a bitch sometimes, clearly there are limitations in the system.

>>11384658
He seems to have been involved in some good things. But he actually is comparable. A lot of the articles he's involved in, and they're so numerous how involved he actually was is questionable, receive none or low number of citations, self-citations included.
Doesn't mean he's a hack, far from it, and I'm not in his field so I couldn't judge, but he's definitely a hardcore farmer fully playing the game and as a celebrity it's easy for him to maintain that.

>>11384686
just go ahead and say it.
He's nothing compared to Grothiendeck, or even a Galois.
Admit it.

>>11384696
Who could compare to Grothiendeck, or even a Galois?!

>>11384544
math is so advanced and sophisticated nowadays, any groundbreaking research pushing the field forward is going to be too esoteric for the majority of people to understand.

>>11384558
huh yeah, he btfoed trump in a manifesto.

>>11384662
Yes, I think engineers do use the results from his paper to design algorithms behind the hardware of medical imaging, there are like bazillions of 'l1 recovery sparse signal', 'sparse approximation', 'compressive sampling' type algorithms in the years following that publication until today. No, they are not tinkering around randomly when they write the programs from those algorithms.

from cursory googling
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~mlustig/CS/CSMRI.pdf
https://authors.library.caltech.edu/10092/1/CANieeespm08.pdf
etc.

I don't know if the engineers can derive results such as Restricted isometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restricted_isometry_property or the robust uncertainty principles and all the bounds involved, but I know that this paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0409186.pdf shows there is a way to get around the fundamental limitation of Nyquist Shannon sampling theorem and thus created a new paradigm for signal processing.

I think the main reason people think Tao is a meme is because he gained a lot of fame without being a theory builder, i.e he didn't create any theory so that lay people can quote and go 'woo wee' but he's more of a problem solver, he solves specific technical problems that are incomprehensible to non experts, so it's a reasonable question to ask how come this guy is famous, what has he done. The answer is nothing you could appreciate unless you spent years studying the relevant research literature.

>>11384686
You can just ignore those articles that has low citation or too high ratio of self citation, I'm not even looking at them. There are ridiculously many papers cited by people from different fields it's actually hard to keep track of.

>>11384471
fields medal at 12