Might want to wait a few days before thinking about putting the freeze on it, which may or may not be worth your time since the crooks will just be able to unfreeze it without your PIN anyway by using your stolen info, and also so that your PIN is a little more unique. The PIN's they are giving out are just strings of date + time, and plenty of people are freezing their accounts now. Reddit recommends just putting an alert on your file, and it just takes a phone call.

That all said, one of my the best TA's I ever had was an aspie.

Sure, I just mean, math people tend to be kind of spectrum-y anyways.

There's certainly a range. I actually feel that sentiment applied more to physics and CS, but that might have something to do with those departments being dominated by awkward "neckbeard" types and also being highly gender imbalanced. I don't want to sound like a tumblr feminist slinging mud at the more extreme 'male' intellectual styles here, but at least at the undergraduate level if you don't go to a technical institute, the math department is actually pretty darn normal and even has about an even split between men and women.

The only group of people I noticed dominating the grad math department was international students.

I actually think one of the reasons mathematicians don't make a whole lot of eye contact is because they use so much spatial reasoning for internal cognition. I know that when I am having an intellectually demanding conversation with somebody with whom I do not have a deep intellectual connection to, I tend to find their gaze very distracting.

In fact in an fMRI study, it has been shown that mathematicians use parts of the brain that enable spatial reasoning in conjunction with the linguistic parts of the brain in a way that non-mathematicians don't (at least when doing arithmetic, as the study had them doing).

The joke goes like this: "How do you tell the extroverted mathematician apart from the others in a group? Answer: s/he looks at the other people's shoes."

I mean, the truth is that many of the women majoring in mathematics are aiming to teach high school, where having a math degree pays more. I think 2/3rds of my graduating class were teaching emphasis. Research math is every bit as dudebro as physics and CS. There's still plenty of social pressures against women in STEM.

I'm leaning towards working with a woman as my advisor. Her and one of her students are active in AWM and I've discussed this a bit with them, and nobody seems to have an idea of how to solve the problem.

Also, at least at my school, the department is heavily European and American. Surprisingly small number of Chinese, but then again, I'm coming from Southern California.

When I'm dwelling on a new topic, then yeah, the full social range taxes my thought process. So it's desirable to avoid contact. People's brains are organisms, they adapt to whatever a person does, so it's no surprise mathematicians have particular oddities. Probably similar to anyone involved in higher level math, if there's an exception, then maybe it's with the strict logical thinking required for proofs. I dunno, I don't know much about the brain, and I suspect neither do brain scientists.

1. Pay public high school teachers enough so that it starts to become an attractive enough profession to attract people with PhD's, not just a low paying job for college graduates that largely consists of babysitting, something that women inclined toward maternal roles seem to gravitate toward. Also recognize the fundamentally broken nature of the American school system, which is based on standardized testing and competition, and lags seriously behind countries like Finland, which don't overload their students with homework and hire highly educated teachers.
2. Offer universal, paid maternity leave so that women can take a more serious career path and also nurse a child.
3. Tell boys how immoral it is for them to use physical attractiveness of their wife or girlfriend as a proxy for a measure of their success in life, thereby removing a fundamental imbalance between the sexes that causes one to work themselves to death for no good reason other than brain chemistry. Castrating all men would go a long way to leveling the playing field vis-a-vis natural ambition.

Just to be clear here, it's incredibly important to be social as a successful researcher. If you feel the need to get your **** done faster because you need to be better prepared before putting yourself out there socially, all the better if it motivates you. But Richard Hamming basically said that of the people he knew at Bell Labs, almost nobody who worked with their office door shut all the time did anything noteworthy.

Interesting! I guess it's a West Coast thing.

Do share!

In Canada and the USA, authentication for most goods and services including credit applications and filing tax returns, is based on the filer knowing a preponderance of non-secret biographical information. For example: name, mailing address, date of birth, social security number. Most of this information is publicly accessible as a matter of course. Your SSN is effectively the single point of identity verification that banks and the government use.

The way things worked on Thursday is, any time you wanted to sign up for a bank account, a new credit card, or water service, you'd hand over your SSN and they'd use the SSN verify that the person ordering service is really you. Obviously this is stupid. This is basically like if we used Google accounts to authenticate with sites, but instead of OAuth2 we just gave every site our Google password. Well, actually it's slightly worse than that, but it doesn't matter right now.

As of Friday, SSNs are now public knowledge. So now even ^ this ^ janky a.f. authentication scheme doesn't work anymore. Which means until the government steps in and offers a replacement, the US (and every other country Equifax has infected) is running on the honor system.

So what are the probabilities that anything will be done?

A quick search shows there are less than 150k working math PhDs globally. There are 3.1 million elementary and secondary teachers in the U.S. alone. Given that most math PhDs will be working in universities and private research groups, I don't know how realistic it is to get large amounts of mathematicians working in elementary education, exception at extremely well-funded private schools. Paid maternity leave is a good idea. As for educating boys about morality, those battles are harder to win. Today things aren't as bad, but men are still culturally expected to be breadwinners and women to be homemakers, and that's still reflected throughout much of society. Moreover men are expected to be more competitive and it's more acceptable to dedicate yourself wholly to a study. All of these contribute to why men dominate math research.

As well, many people I know would refuse to work at elementary education out of principle. Frankly, it's not very engaging work. Part of the reason women find it more acceptable is, well, women are still expected to be the primary caregivers to children.

This is absolutely true. Good research is always done collaboratively. Just look at the weird debates surrounding the supposed proof of the ABC conjecture or the guy who claimed to prove N \neq NP but hadn't. When you isolate yourself, it hinders research and clogs up the pipes. I don't know how well Ted worked with his peers, odds are not well.

What I really mean is that teaching is a different skillset than research. I know plenty of great researchers who are poor teachers, poor researchers who are great teachers, and people who are good at both or suck at both. So, I don't know if his performance in the classroom would be a condemnation of him as a mathematician.

Norbert Blum, for the curious. He finally admitted the proof was mistaken, but took too long and ignored criticism.

I think we can start with high school. Elementary school is an entirely different kettle of fish that is going to conflict even harder with traditional gender roles, but if you look at other countries, it's totally possible to have highly educated people of both genders teach high school if you pay them enough.

Moving out to the woods didn't help much. Last I checked he had been doing work in analytic function theory that hasn't been much cited at all.

(If you're going to be an evil sociopath at least try to do enough quality work to get a stuff named after you.)

I mean, Grothendieck moved out to the woods as well and we can state the opposite about his research. Never heard about Teichmüller before, but not surprised, I mean, Germany held many of the world's best academics, and not all of them left or opposed the Nazis. Which should tell us something about the relationship of reason to moral capacity.

Ironically enough I might as well quote Kaczinski here, but the fact that people see teaching children through the metaphor of raising children might have something to do with industrial society making what should have been seen as a communal role as an impersonal activity. Plenty of men want to be city council leaders, so why not also teach the next generation of children if altruism is your thing.

High school would be possible. I suppose it would be worth studying the numbers, but I mean, other countries seem to be able to afford better instructors and spend less on education than we do, so I bet it's possible. U.S. just sucks.

Not only was he a Nazi, but he disobeyed his superiors in order to get direct authorization from the fuhrer himself in order to go fight on the front lines (two times).

Oh, and by the time he got there the second time, well, the Russians had already devastated the German force, and then he got killed.

Sadly this is the case. The public school system here is just so royally ****ed in so many ways that the people who have the power to change it wouldn't even recognize the problems for what they are. Just more standardized testing and poor results.

But you have heard of Inter-universal Teichmüller theory:

That's a good idea. Teaching should probably be a more personal, longset relationship, where maybe one talented math person can teach mathematics to the same students over the course of years. So that teaching goes past our modular system and is closer to apprenticeship in a subject. I doubt that will happen, because, industrialization is kind of a pandora's box. But it would be nice.

I had heard the name, but knew nothing of the man.

I wonder if the man knew of Wittgenstein - Wittgenstein did the same thing, started as an artillery engineer and volunteered himself into a dangerous recon position - Teichmüller maybe wanted to mimic that and just died instead.



*shrug*

Going back to the gender roles thing, it's probably not totally fair for me to look to Scandinavia for guidance without recognizing the cultural difference. This may just be begging the question, but according to Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory, the USA is far more "masculine" a society, which may reinforce traditional gender roles.

That sounds like a good idea, but what I was trying to say is that in an industrialized society, people tend to view the work of others as a function that maps wages to compartmentalized units of work, rather than viewing the contribution of the worker as a communal undergoing (like serving in city council).

If people view elementary school as simply babysitting, then you're only going to end up with people who are okay with being seen as babysitters becoming teachers.

When did the theory that tried to subvert gender roles stop criticizing binary ways of thinking and instead lean so hard into them? Gee willickers.

The gender studies department is down the hall. Hofstede is widely cited in management and drew his conclusions from data he acquired during his tenure at IBM, so your're not going to see him tilting at windmills so much as confirming existing trends.

But, you know, it's easier to proclaim from an ivory tower how the world should be according to some universal ethical maxim than it is to collect actual data.



At any rate, I conceded the limitations of this perspective when I admitted that this kind of thing no more than begs the question, so long as we are talking advocating that norms be changed. My only point was that if we want to emulate Finland, well, maybe it would be better to introspect a little bit more first and ask ourselves why we came out as so masculine on his scale, and Finland as so un-masculine. And maybe then we might see how trying to naively transplant what works there to our society may be doomed to fail.

That Equifax breach has barely made our national news (I've actually not encountered any Finnish news about it but I'm sure there is some), so it must not be as serious as you guys were making it out to be!

Well that might be because "the" hackers are still giving Equifax until September 15 to pay the 600 BTC, in exchange for ~destroying~ the data (assuming they have it).

That's true.

Not talking about math anymore here, but OTOH, if you actively try to stifle the male drive to create you're probably going to retard society. Then again I don't think we need too much more acceleration (which would appear, once again, to be driving us toward some kind of international catastrophe) so maybe it's not a huge deal if we give up on creating more Richard Feynmans, but I am generally of the opinion that we can always use more brilliant men. I just wish they wouldn't use their intelligence to extract money on wall st.

That's not to say that there are things we can't do to make the discrepancy between male and female inclinations less comical, but you're going to hit some hard limits on the practicability of fighting the usual cultural amplification of gender differences without being self-defeating or counter-productive. Just look at all the vitriol against feminism starting with gamergate and finishing with Trump.

Edit: might want to look this over again if you read it before, since I negated an entire clause in my last edit

Interestingly enough, research has become so collaborative that in a lot of ways (or was it always? actually what I hear now is that it has become more specialized, which makes me think isolated. IDK), it might not even be a good thing to act too "masculine".

OTOH, from what I've heard, the grant process (e.g. DARPA) has become utterly stupid in the sense that the bureaucracies have become so anal about needing to prove utility to grant reviewers, who by definition have a mindset mired in the present world, and are going to reject any blue sky proposal outright. Either that or the people I was listening to who complained about this are pissed off that research has become cumbersome enough that their back-of-the envelope style isn't cutting it anymore. I still wouldn't bet against DARPA lacking vision, though.

The other problem with funding agencies (in the case of the person who told me this, funding agency means NIH) is that because of the cost of completing the grant process, a small number of people have figured out how to basically clean up and win almost all of it (this person now works at Google as an Android SWE, and has doubled his salary, despite having a now unrelated PhD in medical imaging).

Still not convinced of the gravity of the situation, lol!

Don't mock us! We are stuck with a broken approximation of national ID, which is highly problematic even not considering the leak. This is just something of a definitive blow in its credibility as a workable system.

The really sad thing is that I don't imagine a replacement becoming a political issue unless we start to see a precipitous uptake in fraud.

If it doesn't end up causing some serious grief and chaos, that'll just be luck. I mean it's possible that fraud was never attractive enoughanyway for it to happen in proportion to what this makes possible, but the gate is wide open.

So, random thing here. In group theory there's a concept called group presentations, which are a way of writing your group as a generator and relations. i.e. we have n "letters" {a_1,...,a_n}, and a collection of relations {r_1,...,r_m}. The basic object of the presentation is a word written in letters, reduced by the relations: the relations are basically combinations of letters that reduce to nothing, so take any word and, if a sequence of letters is equal to a relation, you can delete it.

So this guy, Dehn, asked a question in 1911: can you come up with an algorithm which will allow you to determine whether an arbitrary word in an arbitrary presentation is actually just the identity (nothing). It was unsolved for about 40 years and saw a solution in an unusual place. Apparently, this problem can be reconstructed inside of a Turing machine, and a little messing around will show one that answering Dehn's question is actually equivalent to the halting problem, so it's undecidable.

A little random but I think it's interesting that a pretty important result in group theory was answered in computability theory.

you should post this result of yours on vixra.org

Also, my fellow comrads in this thread need to watch S3E7 of R&M ASAP. It's spectacular and very relevant to this thread.