/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11507963
hep?

>>11507978
High Energy Physics.

>>11507963
Last year. What's your exit plan?

>>11507998
I finished my PhD and am now working remotely as a programmer. Fuck academia, fuck referees and fuck 20 page papers that just say the same shit that everyone already knows but in a slightly different way

>>11507963
I looked into graduate school years ago and searched publications from professors related to my field of work. Most of their papers did not matter at all and the few professors that published anything noteworthy did so 20-30 years ago and are now publishing totally unrelated and superfluous garbage.

>>11508011
I still need around 2 more years to finish, but already made some business contacts. I don't want to be a programmer though.
Are you happy with your employer?

true innovation lies within the private sector. this confuses and angers commies and nerds.

>>11508984
Not quite, I'm trying to start a business on the side. You get used to not really "working" in academia and having more long term goals. Companies like to micromanage you and treat you as an asset.

It's better than working at a local company though, I can just stay in my bedroom and do other things when I'm not working. It really depends on your personality, it might even be better to bullshit around in academia for a few years and save some money before leaving.

>>11507963
Another failure trying to rationalize his own illiteracy.

>>11509075
>Iliteracy
I have 4 published papers, I know exactly what I am talking about. Don't project

>>11507963
That may be the case for stagnated and useless fields like physics and math, but engineers still produce papers that are basically just detailed and educational solutions to issues that need to be solved. Are they useless to people outside of that sector of interest? Yes. But they needed to be written because they solved a problem. This is not the case for other fields that are actually useless (math, physics).

>>11509082
No, it's you projecting the irrelevancy of your own papers on the papers of others.

>>11509111
> papers that are basically just detailed and educational solutions to issues that need to be solved
write the most generic of descriptions which applies to any paper of value whatsoever: only in engineering this is possible

>>11509111
That same logic would also apply to machine learning papers, which attempt to solve practical problems but end up also becoming useless academic babble

>>11509131
99% of the problems in modern mathematics do not need to be solved. They are pedantic word games. Grants are given to engineers to solve real issues with actual value in being solved. Mathematics research is funded mostly by philanthropists and crossover with engineers who need something proved.

>>11507963
I won't deny that this is true to some extent. The thing is, it's also a big cope.
Sure, 95% of academics are mediocre and don't advance scientific knowledge to any sensible extent throughout their careers.
But, it's pure cope to deny the existence of those 5% who actually produce life-changing scientific breakthroughs.
That doesn't mean the remaning 95% is useless - you are there to create a bigger, more competitive environment which allows the actually good researchers to shine. If there weren't so many people trying to solve certain problems, or making it in academia in general, then the best too would be less inspired to put the required effort.

>>11509111
>engineers still produce papers that are basically just detailed and educational solutions to issues that need to be solved
lolololllloo

Engineering "papers" are the fucking worst. People can't write for shit. Either they're lieing about results (MSc student of mine disproved a whole class of papers, they were showing cherry-picked examples) or they're discussing useless insights like "look, if I develop the solution in a functional basis, the results become better if I use more basis functions!!11". They don't know statistics at all and finding error analysis is as rare as a truthful girlfriend.

>other fields that are actually useless (math, physics).
Ah, okay, you're coping I see.

>>11509141
Agree.

>>11509156
>They are pedantic word games
Agree, just see Terence "best mathematician in the world" Tao's paper where he proves that almost all collatz orbits almost reach 1. You take some irrelevant categories, prove something about them and bang, you have a paper

>>11509156
>do not need to be solved
Who says that? You?

>>11509182
The entire private sector which is unwilling to fund pointless research says that.

>>11509186
Except it is?

>>11509082
>creates thread bemoaning the fact that academia is naught more than pointless, irrelevant dickwaving and paper publishing
>attempts to establish legitimacy and authority by claiming authorship of 4 (!!!) published papers

what did he mean by this

>>11509156
>Grants are given to engineers to solve real issues with actual value in being solved.
Half a dozen reads in the past 10 years and never going to end up in a reference manual or a methodology.

>>11509187
>no you
Go apply for some grants to fund your search for the 50 trillionth digit of pi or your attempt to prove the existence of the homoerotic numbers

>>11509199
He responded to someone calling him illiterate on the subject. Get off 4chan for a while, your attention span will increase.

>>11509204
>>11509186
The fact that you're lumping applied together numerical simulation and modelling with number theory already shows you have no idea what you're talking about.

Looking for approximations of pi sounds more like something an engineer would be interested in than a mathematician. So, basically, you are making a fool out of yourself.

If you mean pure maths, then yes, there is not much private funding. Even then, what makes private funding better or more important than public funding?

>>11509210
>numerical simulation and modeling
This falls into the fields of engineering and cs and not math

>>11508985
Name one major innovation the private sector has produced in the last year

>>11509225
>what is applied maths

>>11509230
>what is applied math
Computer science and engineering

guys, we need a research paper on stochastic nanoscopic couette flow of ferromagnettic fluids between two viscoelastic plates with numerical peridynamics computer simulation.

>>11509225
Wow it looks like you really don't know what math is used for!

>>11509208
4 papers might as well mean hes illiterate desu

I think I always knew it was a machine. The Profs will tell you early on about how heartless and comptetitive the publish and perish culture is.

I don't agree that the output is irrelevant, even if lots of papers may be for any one person. I often google and find out that somebody studied in detail some nieche linear algebra topic and did calculations and put things into frameworks - those are certainly not notable problems, but when you searcha round and find somebody published the work on it, it's great.

>>11509059
If anything, the lockdown shows me I'm not productive when just sitting alone.

>>11509141
The practical problems in machine learning is bringing the hardware together to run the software. Software improvements are naturally done in incremental theoretical steps, because the field is old enough for the progress being hardware related. There's no fun - at least if you're theoretically minded - to cut things off here and there to make things work with the hardware you have or with the power capactity you have.
I rather read papers about the theoretical application of path integrals to relearning in weight-space than try out this and that tool and write nasty emails with the chip producers etc.

>>11509156
"actual value" is a meme under capitalism. What's valuable? Making people live to 100 instead of 85 via fighting cancer? Make machines faster so that the entertainment products can be engineered in higher quantity? There's no progress, if progress means maximizing profit, if profit means competitive redistribution of the exchange value surrogate. The "value" progress argument is made under the premise that technological change is an attained advantage per se. It's to say a child drawing an image is useless because it doesn't change the digits stored on the bank server associated with your name. The latter is part of a usefull ethics, so enhancing some metric within that is also not useful. Not as useful as the fun some guy has when doing math.

You faggots talking about how math is "useless" and so on probably have no clue how much apparently abstract subjects such as set theory, mathematical logic and foundations of mathematics in general helped the advance of humanity. Well, in one sentece: without them, we wouldn't have computer science.

Similarly, you probably don't understand how important cathegory theory, which is currently being developed, is going to be in the near future. But you'll see.

I have to agree, though, that I do find analysis to be a somewhat stagnant branch of maths, currently.

>>11509339
True, but it helped his point in that context.

>>11509371
Those fields were all established >=100 years ago. Nobody argues that math as a whole is pointless; people just have disdain for modern math, and rightfully so. It is by far the worst offender for “incremental and pointless advancements”.

>>11509414
cathegory theory, though, has not been established. And it is, as I've said, my firm belief that it will be the foundation for whatever we will have in the near future.

Now, I can agree that modern maths don't put enough efforts in showing how they can be relevant. But I'd say other sciences are even worse. At least in math, if something is established, then it is "for real".

In other sciences, though, results that are proven aren't just useless; often, they're downright false. As someone pointed out above, most modern scientists don't have a grasp on the statistics that they rely so much on. And this goes back to trying to show how math is important: after all, the reason we trust statistics is because of the math behind it, that justifies how from a limited number of observations we can infere, within a reasonable doubt, if a result is true or not.

Now, this all goes back to basically one thing: academia is corrupt, as everything is. Yeah, really insightful and original. But that's what it is. Math, however, is much more difficult to be corrupted.

As you can probably tell, I'm currently studying math. I don't want to be a part of academia. I actually want to do something relevant. The reason why I study math is not just it's pure part, which, while interesting and beautiful, may not be "enough to feed mouths". But what I really value about studying maths is how it shapes your mind. How it forces you to be methodical. I think more people could use that.

>>11509386
Yes making him look even bigger coping faggot.

>>11509371
Under current academia, those things you mention would enter the category of "unpublishable crackpoterry" and not "irrelevant bullshit papers", because no one likes those radical new ideas. Cantor suffered from this in the 19th century, today would be worse

>>11509463
The axiomatic approach present in mathematics is the reason it is so hard to corrupt. But this is present in other fields, e.g. classical mechanics (where conservation of momentum, etc. and rigid body/particle assumptions take the place of axioms) and true philosophy. Scientists err when they neglect to establish sound axioms and definitions, and mathematicians err when they establish such niche axioms and definitions that their work is absolutely pointless in any useful context.

>>11509229
spacex reusable boosters (not in last year but still)
all interesting deep learning (overall field saturated with memes) comes out of microsoft and google, and thats just what they publish

>>11509694
>reusable boosters
The concept and research for reusable boosters has existed since a very long time
>all interesting deep learning (overall field saturated with memes) comes out of microsoft and google, and thats just what they publish
All of the machine learning that Google, Microsoft and others are using has already been extensively researched by the academia since the 80ies - there is nothing new there, just some fine tuning

>>11509593
No, it is You who errs, for it seems that you don't understand the true value of mathematics.

Mathematics is not so much about "statements about reality" as it is a "framework for statements about reality to be formulated in". That is why axioms in mathematics are so "general" and may seem, in some specific cases, so "niche" to folks like you.

Other sciences DO in fact, as you said, establish postulates - or, in other words, "axioms". In so far as they do, they are mathematics, and, in so far as they are mathematics, their more specific propositions fall under the umbrella of the more general and already established propositions in mathematics. Other sciences differ from mathematics in the extent in which they actually have to do with reality: their postulates are derived from observation, while mathematic's, at least in principle, don't necesarily. However, this shouldn't be regarded as a weakness, but a strength. A limited strength, of course, that can turn into weakness if abused - but a strength, nonetheless

ITT brainlets

>>11509929
Yes, you

>>11507963
>When did you realize that academia has become a system of mass production of irrelevant incremental papers?

I relish it. There are certain oldfart scientist colleagues who splerg out everytime someone publishes something that doesn't have a buttload of evidence backing its claims; just enough to make it believable. And it's amazing. I've chosen to stray from the traditional academic path and only try to publish shit papers which rile up oldfarts.

>>11509346
>I often google and find out that somebody studied in detail some nieche linear algebra topic and did calculations and put things into frameworks - those are certainly not notable problems, but when you searcha round and find somebody published the work on it, it's great.
You know anon my opinion leans more towards that of the OP but you are right, when I found a paper a couple days ago (published in the 2000s even, which is a little surprising for the subject) about convexity and the strict positivity of the fourier transform that had exactly the theorem I suspected was true from my numerics I was pretty happy.

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