๐งต Untitled Thread
Anonymous at Mon, 4 Nov 2024 14:02:27 UTC No. 16462099
Is it actually possible for someone with a top 1% / 0.5% IQ (or any non-meme index) to learn all of the math required for applied math / actual applications in a lifetime? What percentage of the math with know is exactly "pure"?
Anonymous at Mon, 4 Nov 2024 16:33:32 UTC No. 16462311
>>16462099
Yes. But it's better to get some niche and expand there.
Anonymous at Tue, 5 Nov 2024 16:38:47 UTC No. 16463749
>>16462099
You can do it! I believe in you.
Anonymous at Tue, 5 Nov 2024 21:46:48 UTC No. 16464113
>>16462099
yeah but there's no point in learning "everything" because you'll get autistically concerned about one field in pure maths. depth > breadth
and if you don't know what qualifies as pure maths then you're not ready yet
Anonymous at Tue, 5 Nov 2024 22:02:16 UTC No. 16464134
>>16462099
No
So, there's a story about John Von Neumann. He wanted to gauge his knowledge of math, and decided to have his friend (Ulam?) give him a PhD examination style interview where he was asked a bunch of random areas of math, and to see where the gaps in his knowledge was. Afterwards, he was a little disappointed, and said afterwards that a single human can probably at most only master about 1/3 of all mathematics. And this was decades ago, which means there's decades of progress since.
Gotta wonder how much Hilbert actually knew, and where he was lacking. A question like this would be fun to ask Terence Tao, and to see how much he thinks he knows.