Mathematics: What do grad students in math do all day?

Yasha Berchenko-Kogan:

A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what's going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it's not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article.

The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don't really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.

What can you say?

"It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy."

That's certainly better than nothing, but it doesn't tell you everything you might want to know about a vacuum cleaner. Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean bookshelves? Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean a cat? Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean the outdoors?

The authors of the papers and books are trying to communicate what they've understood as best they can under these restrictions, and it's certainly better than nothing, but if you're going to have to work with vacuum cleaners, you need to know much more.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 17, 2013 2:10 AM
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