11 Responses to “Filling an Internet Niche”
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If only we were all so good looking, and had such bright futures…
“My future’s so bright I have to wear shades”?
Bad 80s song.
I reckon that all current or former PhD students can relate to this site! And there’s more than a grain of truth in it!
Well, these characters seem to be given resources by their universities to do their work, and don’t have to provide it themselves. How crazy is that?
Actually, Liam, one thing that surprised me when I worked at UQ was that PhD students had to wait a year for a desk. At QUT, PhD students are treated very nicely indeed in terms of facilities and money, because there are fewer of them and the University wants to attract potential candidates from Sandstones.
Maths PhDs seem to be treated very well - we always had a desk and access to a computer (which we usually had to share) in an office with other research students. But there aren’t too many maths PhDs, and the depts really want to attract them, so perhaps unis allocate more money. But there’s no way you could do a maths phd without a computer (even if you don’t do any computations).
What did they do before they had computers for maths research, Sach?
I was just thinking about that - they would have gone to the library to search for papers, and a lot of mathematical typists were employed (this was true only 25 or 30 odd years ago). The internet has immeasureably speeded up the dissemination of research - people can download pre-prints of papers instantly, while it might take years for journals to publish a paper. I think that that’s one of the significant changes.
Also, many more people can do computations now - previously you’d have to (I believe!) book time on a big computer, write your program in whatever form was required (eg punch cards), and there you go - now the computing power is much greater than previously. Mum used to work in the students admin section of UQ dealing with their computers, and I remember that she said back in the 80’s that the big uni computer had 15 gigs of hard disk space.
Also, even pure mathematicians might now use computers to do some calculations - checking some things - doing math experiments - checking examples of their theorems. While computers are not essential for pure math research, they help it enormously. But you do need to type up your work now (although some oldies still give it to the admin staff to do) - for that you definitely need access to a computer!
The biggest changes would be for the mathematicians who did simulations/computations on computers - eg applied math people, and possibly statisticians. I remember reading that physicists in the 30’s (or thereabouts), would use giant calculating machines to do long and tedious calculations which your desktop computer could now do in a jiffy.
The history of Chaos maths as described by James Gleick in ‘Chaos’ is a great example of a field just waiting for the technology to appear.
One of the first computational devices was an analogue computer. Yes, analogue - like an olde time telephone switch board!
Also, people made machines out of gears and similar things to solve (differential) equations - eg to predict where an aircraft might be in a few seconds given some initial data in WWII.
But the primary tools of a pure mathematician are: paper, pencil, eraser, and other people to chat to.
The really really interesting thing about chaos, is that Poincare was thinking about it in the late 1800s! (search for homoclinic/heteroclinic fixed points of mappings)…