why do we rate geniuses based on the potential practical applications of their research and not on how smart they are?
>>7945397
Nigga in 50 years IUT could be taught to postgrads, "everything is trivial" is the most insufferable meme on this board and the easiest way to spot a high school student.
>>7945397
Because geniuses are people who are extremely smart. That's why we rate them on how smart they are, dumb fuck.
>>7945406
Oh shit I am the dumb fuck.
I thought you were saying the opposite.
My b
I think most geniuses ARE judged based on their smarts.
Truly intelligent people can design things that are so easy to understand that anybody can use them.
An analogy would be a conversation. Who is better talker? The one who is very good at getting their point across and understood or the one who loses their listener in convolution?
OP
Could you realize calculus, and the theory of relativity on your lonesome without someone spoon feeding you why the fuck you are doing what you are?
NO!
STFU
>>7945432
why are you comparing them to me idiot? They're being compared to other geniuses
>>7945440
alright, unfair... you got me...
how about, the "lesser" geniuses not having the foundation of the later geniuses.
you know standing on the shoulders of giants and all that shit...
the "lesser" geniuses could be just as smart or smarter but simply what resources/concepts were available made it so they could only go so far.
CREATING THE FOUNDATION FOR THE NEXT GENERATION TO EXPAND UPON...
>>7945397
Einstein absolutely revolutionized our understanding of physics. In a single year he solved outstanding problems in several different fields of physics.
Mochizuki created a new branch of mathematics over a decade, which was probably extremely challenging as well, but it is so abstracted and removed from reality we can barely compare the two.
I'd just say they are different types of genius.
Because by your 'definition', how smart they are depends on how many prerequisites there are to begin to understand the knowledge they created, instead of appreciating their intelligence based on the logical deductions and hypotheses they made, given a limited amount of information.
IUTT is only understood by very few because you need to devote a long part of your life just to read the prerequisite papers developed by Mochizuki, so obviously it's going to mean not as many people are interested in beginning to understand the subject.
On the other hand, Einstein, for example, built an entire theory that doesn't need anything other than a few assumptions about how space and time works, in a way that was never thought of before, and those assumptions are what lead to him being described as a genius.
There's a huge difference between inventing or discovering something and learning that something after the fact.
>>7945397
General relativity is NOT taught in full to undergrads...
Besides, coming up with an idea as freaky as "matter is energy, because gravity means moving through curved spacetime" and it actually making sense and being correct, is a pretty fucking far strech. That's not just a question of fiddling with a few formulas. That's deeep inspired understanding.
>>7945397
Why do we rate genius on how convuluted their idea is?
>>7945397
>putting Newton above Gauss and Leibniz
W E W L A D
E
W
L
A
D
I don't think most people outside of /sci/ try and "rate" the intelligence of these people or put them in some sort of order. It's a stupid thing to do, like asking who the best musician or actor of all time is or what the best color is. Different people think in different ways and contribute different ideas, and especially when they are separated so enormously in time, it is impossible to put some sort of easily comparable metric to genius.
Even though we can't really rate intelligence or genius, what we can roughly evaluate is "importance," or in other words, the impact the work of these people has had on the work of others.
Newton was one of the first to apply mathematical constructions to model physical phenomena beyond simple ratios and arithmetic. He demonstrated the value of implementing mathematical abstraction and the process by which we create mathematical models to describe reality. He took the foundational steps towards developing calculus, which is critical for understanding any physical phenomenon involving a continuum. He showed that the laws of gravitation here on earth are one and the same with the laws that govern the motion of planets and moons and stars, and thus that the heavens aren't a supernatural realm governed by a different set of god's laws, but simply another area of the universe subject to the same fundamental rules. As a result of his work, we are able to leverage the language of mathematics on scientific questions and understand scientific results in a more universal way.
...
>>7945397
Newton did not discover calc. Fucking Leibniz did, he published his findings first and his notation is the standardised notation for calculus whereas Newton's notation is a bunch of autism.
Also, your post is literally:
>hurr the 3rd floor is more important than the foundation, the foundation is trivial
>>7945623
Didn't Newton use dots? Dots are great when you're doing differential equations.
>>7945626
Yes, Newton used dots for higher-order derivatives.
>>7945610
Einstein made huge contributions to statistical mechanics, described a quantized theory of light that was critical for the development of quantum mechanics, and created a new theory reconciling the at-the-time incompatible results of electromagnetism and classical mechanics, with profound implications about the structure and behavior of space and time. His work is the precursor in some sense to the work of almost all contemporary physicists, as well as many chemists, biologists, engineers, and mathematicians.
Witten is a pretty smart guy who works on really beautiful math. But even though he occasionally works with physicists or on math inherited from physical problems, his work is not really directly physical or scientific. I've met the dude, he's really a mathematician who bums around with high energy physicists. His work is neat, and is highly cited by mathematicians in his subfield, but nothing he has done has leached out to broader relevance.
Mochizuki is also brilliant, but he's kind of an even more extreme case in some sense, since people are still working actively to even parse and understand his latest work. Still, as far as relevance to other researchers, it may actually be that he's actually above Witten. What he's working on is somewhat of a foundational issue in mathematics and it may be that down the line it impacts thinking about how mathematicians in general structure mathematical objects and mathematical thinking. It remains to be seen.
>>7945561
GR isn't usually taught to anybody. If you were to take a class on GR, it would probably be a basics course taken as an undergrad or as an outside-of-your-subfield elective as a graduate student. The material is straightforward enough that if you're a grad student your PI will expect you to just self-study and figure it out.
>>7945637
>I've met the dude
You have to tell us more about this m8
>>7945397
I always thought of a genius as someone with capability far exceeding their peers. Intelligence could contribute to it but wasn't the criteria.
For example, that one guy who balances things. It's difficult to accept that he's actually able to do it. Do I think he is a genius? Absolutely. He is the most genius balancer I've ever heard of. Do I value his genius as much as that of Einstein? No
>>7945637
>if you're a grad student your PI will expect you to just self-study and figure it out
So what's the first 2 years of grad school like, the 4 foundational subjects, then off you go to the qualifiers while scrambling to find an adviser and an RAship?
>sweatybrowman.jpg
>>7945649
>>7945637
This
What's he like? Where did you meet him?
>>7945649
He came to hang around Seattle for a while because his daughter works here and had a baby. He gave a colloquium and a bunch of particle theory seminars. I'm not a particle theorist, so I didn't go to his seminars, but his colloquium actually kind of sucked. He gave the physics department the same talk he gave in the math department, and thus totally lost the audience of physicists because it was so completely divorced from reality or science (as a side note, people tend to forget that most physicists are not particle theorists).
He was talking about knot theory allowing you to establish an equivalence between two types of integrals. These integrals are ostensibly ones that may show up when you're doing some AdS/CFT correspondence calculation for quantum gravity. But neither of the types of integrals he was talking about were renormalizable, and in principle even finding what the integrand is and setting them up would be a herculean task. The whole talk had like two little squiggly hand drawn pictures then just walls of text, which he just read aloud in his ethereal falsetto. Most of the audience was asleep.
>>7945673
Not him and I'm in Ireland, but it was covered along with quantum mechanics and special relativity, along with some other modules, in the first year. I had also studied quantum mechanics already in the last year of my bachelor's degree so we may have quite different set-ups.
I have been told before that the education is more intense here. (Not baiting, but an american lecturer mentioned it)
>>7945673
Depends on the program. Generally you have like 20 hours a week of TAing, plus a somewhat brutal course load that involves about 30-40 hours a week working on electromagnetism, thermodynamics, classical mechanics, and quantum mechanics. You take your quals at some point in the first year, if you fail you can try again the next year.
Usually by the end of your first year, if you're an experimentalist, you have at least a part time RA and get to stop TAing. If you're a theorist, very few of the PIs have any money so unless you secure outside funding you have to keep TAing as well as working. Usually you'll take another couple courses at your leisure to either to fill elective requirements for physics courses outside your field, or because they are in your field and of particular interest to you.
Generally by the end of your second year you should be entirely or almost entirely done with coursework and working full time on your research.
>>7945681
That sounds really cool, even if you didn't know what was going on it must have been an experience to see and listen to him.
>>7945689
I knew what was going on, I am just of the opinion that it is mostly useless bullshit as far as physics goes. Honestly I kind of wish I had gone to get a sandwich or something instead of sit through the talk, it was boring and a waste of time.
>>7945623
>ewton did not discover calc. Fucking Leibniz did,
They discovered it independently of each other. Newton used different notation, but he did the same shit.
Someone post the mind of the samurai copypasta.
>>7945431
So then why don't postgrads learn ebonics?
Why is Gauss not as highly regarded as he should be? He figured out THE most important formula in the whole of mathematics before he even left primary school, along with Weber pretty much invented the internet, figured out space was curved before anyone else, accelerated the field of statistics and proved the fundamental theory of algebra.
>>7945747
Gauss is incredibly highly regarded. Wikipedia:
"Sometimes referred to as the Princeps mathematicorum[1] (Latin, "the foremost of mathematicians") and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had an exceptional influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians.[2]"
What did you have in mind for higher regard than that?
Sushi-kun and Witten are autists, not geniuses.
You have autists who can compute dozen digits multiplications mentally, doesn't make them geniuses.
>>7945693
Mind your edges
>>7945747
Unlike Newton he's not from England.
>>7945763
>my son has an IQ of 165
So Malcolm was never a genius?
>>7945782
unlike autists, geniuses tend not to wear glasses
look at OP's pic
>>7945780
I agree, English people are held to too much of a high regard.
They were about 10-20% of the world around 300 years ago... obviously they would be the ones to make a significant number of scientific advancements. Let's not forget the fact that many theories, proofs and inventions of the Europeans have been founded decades to centuries in the past by Asians- whose culture placed restrictions on research that were far worse than Napoleon's for many centuries.
t. brit
>>7945769
Not trying to be edgy, just saying Witten's a bad speaker and not much of a physicist. Imagine a room that is 80% experimentalists sitting in a dark room for an hour listening to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW0IiXflaVA
and tell me the guy doesn't need to figure out how to adapt his talk to his audience.
>>7945793
*4-7%
considering how sparsely populated the world was that many years back, 4-7% of the world's population on a small island placed huge pressure on agriculture and hence there was an unmet desire for scientific advancement. This was countered only somewhat by colonization. You have to consider that England 300 years ago was probably one of the most depressing places you could possibly live in, though I guess you could say the same about the rest of Europe.
>>7945397
Christopher Langan is the smartest genius of all time and he has an IQ of 200. Nice bait, OP.
>>7945798
But you said you met him...did you like actually talk to him or anything? Also out of curiosity, what do you do yourself, are you a particle theorist?
>>7945397
> why the the relatively few IQ estimation papers all biased
Because literally no one gives a shit about them in the scientific community and they the models were done by very few people with little community input.
>>7945397
shoulders of giants
There should be a SI unit for genius called the Einstein. All geniuses are rated in Einsteins, with Einstein being 1E.
Newton = 2.0E
Witten = .80E
Mochizuki = 1.5 - 2.0E
Descartes = 3.0E
Hawking = .5E
Degrasse = .25E
Nye - .1E
Archimedes = 2.5E
>>7945440
Yeah
Geniuses who USE HIS FUCKING WORK
YOU DOUBLE NIGGER
>>7946272
bill nye the popsci guy was my childhood
>>7946272
>degrasse
>>7945747
because 4chans retarded. same reason you never see Godel brought up, when he's regarded by some in his field as undoubtedly the greatest logician of the 20th century and the most impactful logician since Aristotle.
>>7946573
Gödel**
Who the fuck is Godel.
>>7946573
Not true. He often comes up as proof you can't no' nuffin'.
Intelligence without production is immaterial and therefore useless.
Intelligence which provides change is the driving force of every species.
Genius is often regarded in terms of its impact on academia and research at the time. Disregarding the IQ meme, that means it's not entirely objective. I don't know shit about what Mochizuki is working on, except that it supposedly proves the abc conjecture, but I know most people also don't know shit about it, and that's kind of the problem. Einstein was able to eloquently and drastically simplify 20th century physics with extremely simple and visual arguments that even high schoolers without science backgrounds could understand. He also had the math to back it up. That's the difference between Mochizuki and Einstein (the simplicity part, not the math part). Newton did the same thing but I'm not sure on the exact history of it on how his work was received at the time he released it. That being said, Mochizuki needs time. It's certainly possible that his work is just that far ahead of our time that it won't be well understood for a little while. It'll be a couple decades before anyone can really try and gauge how he has impacted mathematics as a whole and it'll be even more time after that till it's probably taught in most grad programs.
>>7945397
the picture proves the opposite you retard.
>Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
>Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.
>Complexity has nothing to do with intelligence, simplicity does.
