Comment on Statistically unlikely
toynbee@piefed.social 3 weeks agoMy brother has a PhD in pure mathematics. Sometimes I get in trouble (yes, hyperbole) with him because, while I’m pretty decent at arithmetic and I like numbers, he knows so much more about either than I do. For example, I recently said that 57 was a boring number (I tried to connect it to 17, which I like, but was thinking of 19, which is fine) and learned quite a lot from both him and some lemmings.
Another time I told him that I thought there was debate about whether 2 was prime and got quite a lecture on the nature of primality.
Point I’m trying to make is, give at least some math graduates at least some credit.
Gotta add context for readers.
Of all the numbers to call boring you picked the Grothendieck prime.
2 is unambiguously prime. The best motivation for the definition of primality I know is the fundamental theorem of arithmetic: every integer greater than 1 can be uniquely decomposed into a product of primes. That’s what primes are, and the uniqueness constraint is why 1 is not prime.
the uniqueness constraint is why 1 is not prime.
There’s more than one way to multiply numbers to get 1?
1, 11, 11*1, etc
But by that reasoning, 7 is not prime because you can do 7, 1*7, 1*1*7 etc.
Are you my brother?
Dozzi92@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Is the amount of credit I should give them less than, equal to, or greater than the amount of credit I should give English majors?
toynbee@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
I suppose it depends on what you value. Language is more of a creative venture while math is more of a technical one. “Credit” is also somewhat of a nebulous term.
tempest@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I don’t know, once math becomes Greek letters and mathematician names it sort of seems to circle back around.
toynbee@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
That’s a really excellent point.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
majors? you mean bachelors? PhDs get PhD respect. Bachelors get Bachelor respect. It’s not the subclassification of study, it’s the level. if you only have a bachelors, you get less respect than a masters and so on.
toynbee@piefed.social 1 week ago
According to the aforementioned brother with a doctorate, the only thing having a PhD indicates is that you can talk for a long time.
I don’t know if that’s true - I never have been and never will be in that lofty section of academics. Even if I were qualified, and I’m not, I’m not sure it sounds like much fun.
But it’s also important to remember that access to education isn’t always something one can directly influence.
My brother is the only PhD I know on a personal level and I can confirm that he is very smart and worked very hard to get to where he is. I assume that that’s true of most people with similar credentials. However, one shouldn’t automatically dismiss someone because they lack that qualification.