Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize (opens in new tab)

I’m like this. I barely graduated school and failed out of college in the first year with a GPA whose square root was higher than the actual GPA. I had always been placed in accelerated classes only to be kicked out once I fell behind. I needed time to understand things, but in all modesty once I understand something I seem to understand it better than everyone around me. Until then though my mind is blank and I literally can’t force myself to do anything on the subject. I just stumble and can’t remember anything when asked. Some subjects are faster than others but some took a year or longer to understand. When mathematically inclined friends took algebra they flew through it and graduated high school completing calculus B AP with a 5, but it took me a year of failing it and being tracked before I finally clicked. But once I understood it other math courses were a breeze largely because my algebra understanding was beyond everyone else’s. But I was tracked and getting off the track in math is almost impossible. I likewise had challenges in geometry and trig until I “got it,” all of which meant when I finally hit calculus and got the concepts of differentiation and integration I took off like a rocket and never looked back.

After failing out of college I went out to the valley and was very successful. I went back to college in my late 20’s using a loop hole to transfer into a top CS school. I knew myself better now and studied all the time knowing I wasn’t stupid just learned differently. On things that weren’t yet clicking I would relentlessly keep studying it and practicing and trying until it did. I graduated highest in my class at a top public engineering program - which gives gentleman F’s to 70% of original freshmen unlike private schools.

My daughter is the same way, so I found a private school that is very careful about differentiating learners and letting them move their own pace. I was suicidally depressed about public education growing up as it ground me down for being different. She is thriving at the stages I fell off the rails.

I always wonder if people like him are able to learn faster if the courses are structured differently.

This is true but players understood the goal - play better football.

With math it's what exactly?

If someone worked backwards from code on DAY 1 of high school math, I'd have been engaged... Instead it was mindless repetitive drills. Later as an advanced thing they'd ask you a real-world question: "Let's say you wanted to circumnavigate the Earth and you started here and had to blah blah". I think they should start and not end with that type of thing.

it is a shame they don't do physical print through

The world could always use more people like that.

Something something effective altruism.

It doesn't even need to be altruistic. One would expect that out of sheer self-interest, one would look into propelling humanity forward by elevating and liberating as many people as possible, enabling the brightest of our species to solve the hardest problems and elevate humanity. Though accepting that one needs others to solve problems one does not understand, that they play a supporting role, takes a great deal of humility.

I'm always very confused by this. Why are maths lessons more traumatic than, say, history or biology or foreign language lessons? I mean learning lists of irregular verbs is not precisely most people's idea of fun. And yet only about maths do people speak with such dramatic language.

There must be something beyond what's happening in schools themselves that makes people react this way. I just can't work out what it is.

I don't think aptitude is the reason. A lot of people are physically unfit and have traumatic sports education experiences, probably even more so than math, but athletes remain stars.

The issue is entirely cultural. Entrepreneurs, celebrities, socialites are venerated, scientists aren't. There's no mainstream cultural recognition of scientists and science itself, at best people get attention who monetize research.

Just compare how many people know Musk but don't know who Tom Mueller is. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller)

Thank you very much.

Thanks.

This kind of age restriction is indeed pretty stupid, Andrew Wiles was too old for the Fields medal for example.