What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them.
I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects.
But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone?
I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A.
Meanwhile, hardly anyone actually remembers anything about those topics and even the best students mostly go on to achieve only above average things.
My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn’t pushing the boundaries of medical science. I feel terrible writing that because I’m certainly not as smart as him, but R is just so impressive and I’m glad he got his lucky break.
People like R would be lost in the sea of averages because their genius would be kept shut by norms.
Almost every extraordinary person I read about seems like they were 1 step away from being forgotten, and got some huge universal break that boosted them.
It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
Most of these universities look at an applicant's grades for just six courses. After looking at the courses required for certain programs (such as calculus and physics for certain programs), the remainder of the six courses comprise the student's top grades for any courses at the Grade 12 (final year) level.
So, a high school student aiming for a top engineering or mathematics program will not be hamstrung by a poor grade in Grade 12 English, nor will a student aiming for a top international relations program be hamstrung by a poor grade in Calculus. At the same time, the student going into a STEM program will have an exposure to Shakespeare, which can provide inspiration and a rich set of works to explore later in life. The student going into international relations may later be inspired some years later to study mathematics for its beauty as a hobby, some years later.
I remember the feeling that I was wasting time with many of my courses in those years, despite having good teachers for many of them—I thought my time spent on mandatory humanities courses like music took time away from more practical subjects, and I wish I took a programming course (though I did love my English classes). Perhaps this remains true for many students, but I personally took an interest in music performance as a hobby years later in life, and the years-old lessons in music theory came back to me. My English classes also introduced me to literature, which has remained a very important part of my life that has guided me through highly consequential life decisions for the better. It is unlikely that I would have taken an interest in literary works without my exposure to English in school.
In practice, I believe every single Ontario university program lists English one of the required courses so it will always be included in your top six average.
[0]: https://uwaterloo.ca/undergraduate-admissions/admissions/adm...
Though Computer Science and Physics are distinctly different from the mathematics courses, these are still directly useful for a mathematics student to learn—the problem-solving skills should also carry over. Key mathematical discoveries have been inspired by problems in computer science and physics, and many rigorous university-level mathematics books still draw from problems in these fields to motivate certain problems. At the least, they are less laboratory-heavy than Biology and Chemistry (the student could still attempt these subjects, though, and choose to omit the grades for university admissions).
That leaves a couple of other classes—or just one if English is required, as noted by another commenter. My school offered subjects like Grade 12 Drama, Visual Arts, and Music, where much of the grading was effort-based. In my school, most students in my classes saw these courses as a break from other intensive courses, with grades not being as much of a concern. This would allow the student to avoid using a grade for History, Economics, French (or another foreign language), or another subject.
The English requirement would then be a difficult challenge for the mathematics-focused student. I wish I could speak more about what it was like for most of my classmates who went on to study engineering, as many of them took the standard English course (I took a more demanding version of the course, due to personal interest). My classmates at the time did not seem to have an issue with university admissions to competitive programs despite not enjoying the subject at the time, but the other commenter makes a good point that minimum grades for admission standards have increased greatly since then.
--
[1] As an aside: a past classmate—who was brilliant at mathematics and also great with people—later poked fun some years later about the Ontario government's naming for math courses. He said, "there's Grade 11 Functions... and then in Grade 12, there's Advanced (!) Functions." The last I heard, he went on to work as an investment banker at a top hedge fund by profitability in the United States.
Then in university, there’s Elementary Functional Analysis!
So responding to OP, you indeed must be an expert in all subjects to have a chance to study in your field of expertise.
Of course, if English is not your first language then you’re not required to take this course. You have an alternate path which may be a lot more work for an English-language-learner but it doesn’t demand the critical reading and writing skills you would need for grade 12 English.
What does an A++++ mean? I guess it's equivalent of publishing a novel result/idea, solving a long standing conjecture sort of ability? If yes then I'd say the system does accommodate them. Terrance Tao for example was fast tracked and didn't get lost in the system.
Though it probably requires some effort from parents to figure out the right path for their prodigies.
You usually need to pass English and maths GCSEs, but universities mostly care about the subjects you do in the last two years (except for very competitive courses).
This can be a problem for those who want to keep options open until they are 18 (like my younger daughter).
Even the system up to 16 is pretty flexible. There is a huge range of available subjects - although most schools offer only a limited selection (my kids were out of school by secondary school age so we had a huge choice and did some less usual subjects like astronomy and Latin).
Being specific, it's not school, it's what school grants you i.e. a paying job. The higher paying, thusly more coveted jobs, generally filter against good grades which then the requirement pushes downwards into schools because, at scale, it's a decent system; leveraging the schools to help decide who is good.
> Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't.
I counter with, if you are "_really_" good, it shows because you truly are a genius and you get fast tracked on that subject, but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million.
To directly answer your point, for the "slightly smarter than everyone else" my middle school allowed kids to attend highschool in specific subjects and then highschool into the nearby community college and considered "harder/more prestigious" than the AP programs - admittedly only in math for this latter part. The school was in a more affluent neighborhood so I recognize the privilege.
I don't quite understand your point. Pretty good still puts you far ahead of the average. I could easily handle second year college maths and computer science while in high school. And I couldn't hold a candle to Ramanujan.
I still needed to do well in my other courses in order to be able to get into my chosen college.
Whereas if someone was Ramanujan-level, their raw talent would be so apparent they wouldn't have this issue and would clearly stand out.
But he ignored all subjects besides math and lost his scholarship within a year. He later enrolled in another university, this time in Madras (now Chennai), the provincial capital some 250 kilometers north. Again he flunked out.
Maybe it would be different now?
It is not enough to stand out in the current system.
The parent was saying selecting the 50 kids who can handle it is a much better approach than just taking the highest overall grades.
The average A's across the board high school student can't handle second year college maths. Yet they will be placed ahead of the observably better at math kids.
Imagine if jobs worked like this - "Yes, we know you are a great developer but you don't really understand economics. Sorry".
Being well-rounded and having exposure to a bunch of topics is valuable to an extent. However, in my experience most of the people making a real difference in the workplace and academia are not particularly well rounded.
Thankfully in tech there are alternative pathways. However, for many professions there aren't and these high performers are simply excluded to societies detriment.
You can only progress so much in a field of expertise before hitting diminishing return.
At some point it makes sense to broaden your knowledge and skillset.
I suppose how long you can progress for and how far you can progress depends somewhat on the breadth and depth of the field of expertise.
Many fields of expertise are so broad and deep that they have their own sub-fields just to make them manageable.
So you would probably be in a sub-field and then broaden your knowledge and skill-set in a related sub-field of the overall field that you are well suited to.
I'm betting it's likely you can see how your own particular field, as you are on HN, replicates this pattern.
This is exactly the route to exploitation by MBA managers.
Great developer, loyal, doesn't understand the need to change companies to get paid a competitive salary. Perfect hire.
The person who doesn't understand economics pays the price themselves.
- How and when would you know a subject doesn't click? In my case German (my first language) and English sucked for roughly 8 years. I ended school with A in both and was the only student in my school without a single mistake in my exam.
- School gives you good grades if you managed to learn the topics at hand. Being able to learn what is needed or what you are bad at — not what you want and are good at is a skill in itself that can be important in life. I'd argue unless you are an exceptional genius (unlike 99,999% of pupils) you gain more from pulling through than you would if you called yourself a genius and focused on a single topic. Schools goal is to educate the majority
- pupils (and often also their parents) are utterly unable to judge which bits of school will be essential to their later life. I had many collegues who utterly hated every second of a multitude of subjects, only to years later tell me how glad they are now to have had been subjected to it (which brings me back to my first point)
We could (and should!) argue on how school works as a system of grades, teachers and pupils — ideally teachers would motivate students to become curious about and proficient in subjects without the motivation of good or the threat of bad grades. But if my experience as an educator at the university levels (without grades in mh case) shows one thing it is that those first semester students who are really able to judge what will be useful to them later on are not many. Many of them are more like the dog in the meme: "Only stick, no take" — they want to be able to do the cool thing without knowing what is needed to do the cool thing.
I would argue that sometimes students are right when they complaint about a subject being useless or obsolete (e.g. our network professor told us everything about the OSI protocol stack in great detail, and barely touched TCP/IP), but most of the time they don't know what will be useful later in life.
In my country, there are several students (12-18 years old) who can mix sport at high level (national championship) and a lighter school activity. They work like mad but they do it. But they have to prove there are good enough to get it, which is OK to me.
Being really good is not something you appreciate yourself, it's the others that notice.
School education standards are the barest minimum and anyone of IQ > 85 can make them.
Some of what's taught in English classes is about clear communication, and some of it isn't.
I think learning the 5 paragraph essay structure was very useful. But that's maybe 3 months worth of learning. The rest was English major stuff. Which is fine, but please don't pretend that it has a lot to do with "good communication".
> Even if all English does is force you to read more, it's probably a win in this regard.
It's not enough to say people had to read for English classes. You have to compare it to the counterfactual. In that regard, I don't think it stood up well.
1. I was already reading a lot. I just read different things.
2. I came to hate pretty much everything I read in class. It's only decades later that I've been able to appreciate some of the classics that we read.
On this point, I think English class was a net harm, at least for me. Of course, everyone has different circumstances; I'm sure there are people for whom a similar program as what I went through would have been a benefit.
It requires a very small success on a very basic level. It is not good to be a super math genius and know nothing about geography and history.
Now, that’s not to say the only issue is someone’s curiosity. Traditional teaching methods make it very hard to be interested in some topics (history and language comes to mind), but barring that, I’m not sure I accept “it’s not interesting” as a reason not to explore a subject.
Personally I think that we could do better by tailoring every student’s education to their abilities. Put in simplest possible terms, we could arrange classes by complexity rather than by year. Have one class for addition and subtraction, another for multiplication and division, then geometry, algebra, etc, etc. Then let students graduate from one to the next based on proven ability rather than by age. Do the same for language, history, etc. Let every student proceed through the courses at their own speed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School
The kids that went there … some succeeded, some really struggled to adjust to other schools and environments.
My university didn't allow any classes above the most introductory ones to be considered as fulfilling the general education requirement. I signed up for a history class that would involve doing research and having weekly discussions with a small group. I was stoked. Then the professor made a note that it didn't fulfill the general education requirements. I had to drop it and switch to a huge-ass mindless lecture of hundreds of people. I would've liked to still take the more in-depth history class even if it didn't fit the gen ed requirement, but so many of those BS classes are required that my schedule was completely packed all 4 years with zero leeway.
Why is that useful besides for the employer trying to impose Framework v3.0 onto their subjects?
To me at least, learning things one is not excited about is only useful to capitalist society that views human beings as replaceable resources.
At Big US Engineering School, many people are done with their prerequisites in a year.
Unless you're talking about painful core classes like "compiler design" and "networking", which I would say is a different conversation.
As a child I used to get all As and even got into a Stanford pre-collegiate program as a kid where I learned C++ and geometry.
Unfortunately after a surgery in 9th grade that left me unable to attend school for 3-4 months and just terrible QOL for about a year my grades slipped (went from A+ studen to C grade student) and I basically became average. I lost all interest in most subjects at school due to depression and other things.
My goal as a child was to get a Stanford JD/MD MBA (lol I know..), and today I have only a bachelors from a low ranked state college in business.
I enjoyed programming so much as a kid that one summer, so later in life I ended up going back to it. Taught myself enough in a month to get on some projects as a swe. Later I got lucky working at a unicorn company that IPO'd.
Now I am trying to build my own company and see how far I can get as a solo founder. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if it wasn't for that injury, but oh well. Shit happens, right?
Jeez sorry for the sob story but it feels good to get it off.
I believe that any person here with an inkling of relatable technical experience can greatly appreciate the work you've been doing. Software development can be complicated and frustrating, especially when things don't work as you expect them to (but then, you learn and become better). Leading a business is very difficult, often due to sources of problems you don't expect (such as regulatory and legal requirements, accounting, and publicity).
Some people cruise on to great careers without facing many barriers. But many others face unexpected setbacks and have to manage them. A close friend of mine was living an overall good life until it was profoundly disrupted by a civil war in his home country. But he made it to my country where he began his undergraduate degree at a great university that he loves. A past colleague of mine spent much of her early twenties managing physical disability, but successfully received treatment and went on to graduate with an engineering degree. She has since landed a position at a top aerospace company that she really wanted to work at.
You are setting up a good life for yourself. Many people lack that kind of drive or struggle with executing ideas; several people I personally know would be very proud to one day experience just a small part of your successes so far.
Life is truly a journey unique to each one of us.
I’ve found peace and I carry a signed index card in my wallet on which I’ve written my “ethos”. It took me a long time to come up with it and I’m sure it’s common, but those 5 points are something I try to remain true towards.
Cheers mate, best.
I found that I have a certain knack for it and really enjoyed performing.
Being forced to do subjects that you hate is not exposure, it is being forced to do things which you are completely unsuited for.
I would go so far as saying that being forced to take music until 7th grade put me off any musical pursuits for the next 20 years. The less said about the torture disguised as education that is PE the better.
In Europe maybe, but in America a lot of students receive their general purpose liberal arts education in College, and will then specialize later with a post graduate degree.
Also does the above apply also to the most selective and renowned institutions, or only to community colleges?
Could you share your source for statistics on "eccentric geniuses"?
For college and life in general, I think main skill needed is emotional regulation. Everything else flows from that.
While some exposure is probably better on average than none, in some instances bad experiences can trip the fuse on developing an interest.
The rote nature of canned education, bad teachers, bad parents, or bullies can turn kids off of subjects they might otherwise come to love.
then why does this 'discovery process' have to continue into college? That was the OP's point. When money and time is on the line, let adults decide what they want to study. An 18-year-old is no longer a child.
Instead of giving kids grades with a ceiling, each subject would have (unlimited number of) levels of proficiency, and to attain a level, kids would have to pass a test (demonstrate certain skill). The choice of subjects and levels to attain would be up to each kid, but they would have to choose to do something (working at getting next level of something would be mandatory). (Although perhaps they should be encouraged to explore different subjects and attain some minimum of levels.)
Also, I would group kids by subject, and not by age. So kids of slightly different levels would train together, and the higher level kids would be obligated to help kids on lower level to learn, while lower level kids were taught to be respectful of higher level kids.
You seem like someone who thinks things through, so I suspect you’ll know what I’m about to say, but given the sentiment of your comment, I think it’s worth explicitly sharing this:
The fact that your class valedictorian went on to be a doctor is great. Not everyone needs to push the boundaries. Your classmate may end up saving/helping countless lives.
He is saying that the people who add most value to science isn't always the ones who are at the top of the hierarchy in the school system.
Performing well in school is like a F1 racing car: very fast, but can only go on paths very well trodden already, i.e. paved road.
Well norms were in place when R did his work. Even the most strict systems have made concessions for extraordinary people. It is just that mostly average people go around claiming they'd be genius, had system not smothered their creativity.
> I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework..
I think from not many to hardly any as I can't believe if kids who are really genius can just go on for more than a decade of primary schooling without ever finding outlet for their creativity.
I don’t think you can say, even all these years later, that Ramanujan, that mathematician, made the economy more productive, but he certainly increased the high watermark of human civilization and created an inspiring story for individual achievement, creative realization, and artistic and mathematical expression. There’s something sublime and transcendental—no pun intended—in the kind of truths that he was able to tease out and the unique, idiosyncratic way that he expressed them. Sort of like a Basquiat of mathematics, I suppose. Or probably better than that.
That aside, I think it’s unfortunate that he died of cholera or something, isn’t it? I mean, he apparently didn’t think it was unfortunate that he was going to die. And certainly, the formal education system didn’t necessarily fail him, in that a professor at a university recognized his genius and sponsored him to the UK.
But I think, in a sense that you identify, there is this general failure of the education systems in the human civilizations on this planet to foster perhaps the best thing that they could be fostering. They’re more like a manufacturing assembly line to produce cogs as part of the economic machine.
Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. I think it’s good that people can have a role to play in the larger economy and that there are pathways to bring people to the level of capability where they can contribute like that. But the lack of pathways that these systems provide—those that could contribute to the creation of the full realization and expression of individual potential—I think is sad. And I think that’s what you’re kind of identifying.
Generally I think: "Unless you're Ramanujan, then you should probably have some breadth to your knowledge rather than pure depth" is not a terrible policy.
It may now be possible with Videos, Games and VR.
I got mediocre marks in high school but thankfully did well in JEE. Now I have a decent PhD in math with an extremely mediocre school record.
Standardized tests are screwing everything up. People who learn on their own might stumble upon the entire alphabet except for the letter "B," but standardized tests want only the first 5 letters. Hence the incredible efficiency of knowing the entire alphabet is thrown under the bus in favor of making sure none of the 5 are missing.
You can't teach someone to play, and there is no way to play systematically, at scale, and with guaranteed results. All the incredible people I know have some hole in "basic" knowledge, and if it is revealed nobody cares about them being miles ahead elsewhere. "Their basics seem lacking, in the name of stability and norm, throw them back to square one."
Following standards never produces something new, but the world is so afraid of failure and lack of definitions in "messing around" that they are willing to trade their souls for it.
Take any hacker here on HN, and ask how much they learned in CS class vs. how much they learned messing around with Perl on a weekend.
Excellence requires individual attention and cannot be so readily mass produced.
I dispute this on the grounds that students are going through American schools and many of them don't even know how to read.
The number, while high, is not satisfactory. Clearly, we also want adults to be functionally and not pass a super low bar of being able to read a sentence which 92% does not care to distinguish, but it is not fact true that "many of them don't even know how to read".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
We probably aren’t going to get it quite right for that 1, either. Extreme outlier geniuses are extreme outliers and there’s no easily generalizable pattern around them. The ideal education for a young Ramanujan is probably different from the ideal education for a young Von Neumann. Of course in an ideal world we would give an extremely individualized education to every child, but that’s much easier said than done. Failing that maybe we could identify and then invest in the extreme geniuses, but that’s what we already try to do.
Sadly the later part of your comment may hold - I don't remember what ended up happening with him, whether he graduated high school or what. Hopefully at that level you just disappear into academia and not off the face of the earth in general.
https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/factoids/Jean-Shepherd-Cla...
on youtube as well
It's the crazy ones that push humanity forward. We lose far more than we can imagine by not enabling even just one of them. This is one of the most important problems for us to fix.
People who are "weird" and yet are entirely functional are the best of both world and a much rarer combination.
Even within academic stem fields you have people who know how to promote and speak and they have the most influence.
I guess what I’m trying to say is the system is mostly selecting for what it wants.
Zero? If you qualify as a prodigy, it is apparent from a young age. Maths prodigies are especially easy to distinguish. Given a little time, they will self-learn, grok and innovate on anything you throw at them and will likely attend higher education early unlike "the brilliant kid"s who will struggle with advanced concepts all their lives.
The school I went to grades 1--12 tried to be especially good so taught Latin, French. Some of the girls were in ballet. MIT came recruiting. The year before me two guys went to Princeton and ran against each other for President of the Freshman Class (whatever that meant!). In my class, one guy (did nearly as well on the SAT Math as I did!!!) went to MIT.
In one of the early grades, I got dumped on (adenoids, couldn't hear well until that got fixed). Apparently the teachers talked to each other and had me with a dunce cap until I proved otherwise. In 1st algebra, discovered math: I liked it, was good at it, was the best in the class, proved myself, got sent to a math tournament, couldn't get dumped on, etc. Continued that way: Was so good at math that I got an unspoken but powerful by in any subject, e.g., English literature, I didn't like.
Got sent to summer math/physics enrichment programs.
So, for that example, for
> But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone?
some schools will let a student who is good at some one subject get a by in other subjects.
Really, schools, K-Ph.D., have a tough time finding any students really good in even just one subject, are thrilled when they find one that is, and don't want to block him/her because he viewed fictional literature as a not very credible presentation of common reality?
That by pattern continued: In grad school, they insisted that I take their computer science course. My background in computing was already nicely above that course, and I'd already taught a similar course at Georgetown. Soooo, mostly laughed at the course: E.g., they had a test question about Quicksort (very common topic then), and I answered with material they didn't know.
The best case of by: Took a reading course; decided to address a question in the pure math of optimization; two weeks later had a surprising theorem and from that an answer to the question. The work, clearly publishable, was instant news all over the department, some profs angry that I had done well, others pleased. Angry/pleased, the work got me a general purpose by, a gold crown, immunity from any criticism, and an unspoken, implicit, easy path to the rest of the Ph.D.
How would you characterize R's master and the "normie" master?
Ramanujan short life itself is a loss to the world, Imagine how many Ramanujan's were ignored where there is no G.H. Hardy and what about Ramanujans in the other 95%?
The other version in the West is he moves to rural Montana and sends bombs through the mail.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould
This is a late missionary-colonial myth that has been "secularized" by the South-Asia studies dept. in their eternal pursuit of destroying Indian civilization. The British, thankfully, judiciously collected records to prove that this is a big fat lie.
In fact, their records not only show that most village schools were majorly filled with 'Shudras', but also that the equivalent of 'grad-schools' had 'Shudra' teachers.
Hardly surprising since Aryabhata, perhaps a greater Mathematician, and the progenitor of Calculus itself, was one of the said 'Shudras' (atleast certainly not a "evil dirty hook-nosed" Brahmin).
Fascinating though how the cunning Jew meme lives on in so many ways... The Nazi-esque DMK that runs Tamil Nadu was very fond of this as well, and wanted to massacre his tribe too like the Nazis (except ofc. when so-called 'paapans' are great well-known folks like Ramanujan, or say the CEO/CTOs of Google). Unsuprisingly, avowed Nazis like this (there are enough records of the founder being a great admirer of Hitler and of his 'final-solution' - after WW2 ended), like in Ukraine are great friends of the Western establishment.
Also, a cursory search on internet doesn't brings anything conclusive about Aryabhata being a Shudra.
Who are you referring to, specifically?
Basically a propaganda piece, designed to push your buttons. And not surprisingly, published originally in RT.
divinely inspiring
I'm curious to hear how others think about this phenomenon. Do recent advances in neuroscience, AI, or cognitive psychology offer any clues about how innovators like Ramanujan access these hidden sources of insight? Or are we still stuck in the realm of "genius is mysterious"?
That's not to say there isn't something spiritual and mystical in knowledge. I think the fact that he was from a different background gave him a different perspective. But yeah you cannot skip all the math studying.
One guy able to tap into this knowledge in dreams is an indication that it is possible. Now, how do we make this the default for everyone is the question I wonder about
The way we found one variant of wheat in Mexico that was resistant to bacteria, and replicate that to the whole world -- can we do something like that for humans ( even I don't like the sound of it, but I hope you get the feeling )
Great analogy.
Borlaug's famous Mexican dwarves.
According to the Wikipedia page of Norman Borlaug, he _developed_ that variety of wheat.
From Karma Yoga, Chapter: I, Karma in its effect on character—
What we say a man “knows”, should, in strict psychological language, be what he “discovers” or “unveils”; what a man “learns” is really what he “discovers”, by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.
We say Newton discovered gravitation. Was it sitting anywhere in a corner waiting for him? It was in his own mind; the time came and he found it out. All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in your own mind. The external world is simply the suggestion, the occasion, which sets you to study your own mind, but the object of your study is always your own mind. The falling of an apple gave the suggestion to Newton, and he studied his own mind. He rearranged all the previous links of thought in his mind and discovered a new link among them, which we call the law of gravitation. It was not in the apple nor in anything in the centre of the earth.
Whenever I read about Ramanujan having divine revealing formulas in his dreams, I remember Swami Vivekananda’s quoute on consciousness and mind.
edit: found another relevant quote from Upanishads on tapping the infinite knowledge:
Mundaka Upanishad 2.2.9:
“Eṣa sarveṣu bhūteṣu gūḍhātmanā prakāśate, dṛśyate tvagryayā buddhyā sūkṣmayā sūkṣmadarśibhiḥ”
Translation: “The Self hidden in all beings does not shine forth, but it is seen by subtle seers through their one-pointed and subtle intellect.”
Explanation: The ultimate knowledge or truth is hidden within all beings and is revealed through subtle inner perception. The idea is knowledge is latent within the mind, and it is discovered, not externally found.
That doesn't look sound to me. If the "seers" are seeing "The Self", are they beyond and separate from "The Self"? If they do so with their "subtle intellect", is that intellect outside of "The Self"?
If affirmative, then "The Self" is something external to the seer, making the term a misnomer. And furthermore, there is something outside of The Self (that which is seeing The Self), which remains to be explicated.
Quoting one from Katha Upanishad 1.3.10:
"Indriyebhyaḥ parā hy artha, arthebhyas ca param manah, manasas tu parā buddhir buddher ātmā mahān parah"
Translation: "Beyond the senses are the objects, beyond the objects is the mind, beyond the mind is the intellect, beyond the intellect is the Self."
This quote emphasizes that the intellect is still a part of the illusion. Beyond even the intellect lies the Self, which is one and undivided.
Keep your Brahmin hate to yourself.
1) Mathematics Wizard Srinivasa Ramanujan : Some glimpses into his Life and Work by two Indian Mathematicians Narendra Kumar Govil and Bhu Dev Sharma is a good biography with an introduction to his Mathematics and links to further resources. Good complement to Robert Kanigel's book The Man Who Knew Infinity.
2) In order to understand the fascination that Mathematicians have for Ramanujan see this and other lectures by Prof. Ken Ono who credits Ramanujan as his inspiration in becoming a Mathematician; Why Does Ramanujan, "The Man Who Knew Infinity," Matter? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ynhiZJUMzA
3) Mathologer on Youtube has good walkthroughs of some of Ramanujan's most famous identities (eg. 1+2+3+... = -1/12) - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mathologer+rama...
4) All of Ramanujan's published papers and unpublished notebooks can be found online at - http://ramanujan.sirinudi.org/
PS: In the submitted article, George Andrews is wearing a Ramanujan tie :-)
The Man Who Loved Numbers - Srinivasa Ramanujan documentary (1988) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqP2c5xNaTU
Srinivasa Ramanujan: The Mathematician and His Legacy (2016) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5jsgBvJMUc
"An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God" - Ramanujan
Well, at least to western people. Are Indians more familiar with Indian scientists?
I don't think a non STEM guy would know Ramanujan or C V Raman.
I imagine most people won't recognise the name. But everyone's heard of a boson. So he's somewhat immortalised — more than most.
And Mani Chandy for computer science.
In order to rectify the status quo;
1) Everybody should get the monthly magazine Science Reporter published by National Institute of Science Communication and Policy Research (NIScPR), Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi, India. which gives a overview into Indian Science - https://sciencereporter.niscpr.res.in/
2) The two-volume The Mind of an Engineer by Purnendu Ghosh et al. published by Springer contains essays from many of our recent Scientists/Researchers/Engineers etc. - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0119-2
3) Books on Indian Science/Scientists by various authors are available on Amazon India and are worth getting.
4) Also see the books by the great astrophysicist/cosmologist Jayant Narlikar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayant_Narlikar), specifically; The Scientific Edge: The Indian Scientist From Vedic To Modern Times. - https://www.penguin.co.in/book/the-scientific-edge/ and Science and Mathematics: From Primitive to Modern Times - https://www.routledge.com/Science-and-Mathematics-From-Primi...
As someone who benefited greatly from a few mentors in childhood and adolescence, my goal is to be able to give the same to at least a few other people in my lifetime.
But then, if 'mentors' applies to parents, then I guess I'm saying the same thing.
Having said that, my teenage son wastes a lot of his life playing online games with his friends, but having said that, I heard him say mid-game to a friend of his "Brazilian isn't a language you idiot!". So, I mean it's trivia, but he knows there's no language called Brazilian. He's a smart kid (that's not the only data point).
(I had to look it up: Portugese is the official language of Brazil).
Whether they are successful and whether they are mostly a bunch of snake oil is another question...
I am naturally so tired around 9pm when I shut the lid of my laptop that I fall asleep within minutes of getting in bed.
On a side note.. Somehow my dreams have been insane and I’ve low key enjoyed the vivid worlds I find myself in over the past few months.
Wake up around 5 or 6, go for a stroll and then eat some breakfast.
Then I can work taking only breaks for lunch and dinner. Sometimes a 30 min nap in the afternoon in the park.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_edge
> Straight edge (sometimes abbreviated as sXe or signified by XXX or simply X) is a subculture of hardcore punk whose adherents refrain from using alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs in reaction to the punk subculture's excesses. Some adherents refrain from engaging in promiscuous or casual sex, follow a vegetarian or vegan diet and do not consume caffeine or prescription drugs. The term "straight edge" was adopted from the 1981 song "Straight Edge" by the hardcore punk band Minor Threat.
Weird. First time I've ever seen that (abbreviation?) For straight-egde. Thought you were talking about some supplement at first.
I'm naturally tired at around 2am. I barely dream, or can't remember my dreams. I struggle to wake up at 6:30 even after 7+ hours of sleep.
I do like an afternoon nap, but Sunday's are almost the only opportunity. As a bad consolation prize, I involuntarily micro-sleep at my desk, working from home or in the office, a handful of times most days, generally at peak afternoon nap times (1:30pm - 3:30pm).
I wouldn't say I'm productive, but I would say that the work I produce is generally of a high quality.
For instance we banned meth and other drugs that have tremendous productivity effects at the expense of the individual and how we had to deal with them, so it's not a rhetoric question.
Your apparent disbelief in ADHD doesn’t make it imaginary, by the way. Consider yourself lucky that you do not have it; I am unemployable without medication.
I should have been clear I saw it in the "make people smart" light, as doping an already acceptable situation, instead of correcting something perceived as a pathology.
Meth was widely available over the counter at some point, and we made it legally disappear outside of strict medical settings.
I wonder what academia would look like if adderall, vyvanse, modafinil were just as accessible, or even less controlled substances that are considered to enhance mental performance like L-tyrosine, alpha-GPC, Lion's Mane mushroom, Bacopa, or Ginko.
Modafinil is straight up better than caffeine though, which is a crappy and addictive stimulant.
I'm not sure where the distinction actually lies, but it is also considered a (generally recognized as safe) drug.
We really, really know the long term effects.
https://www.psypost.org/new-intranasal-rna-therapy-shows-pro...
But none of them work as well as sleep and exercise.
...or me?
tbf tho, I am somewhat contradicting another comment I made about bioavailability on this very gp thread so suffice to say, I do understand your point.
Wonder why more people aren't using it.
That is not totally true for at least three reasons:
1. Modafinil can interact badly with some other stimulants. One must remain careful.
2. Modafinil by itself can cause SJS and similar serious problems in rare cases.
3. Chronic use of modafinil can easily produce anxiety, so much anxiety that it makes using modafinil impossible. This is even in a very low dose.
Because it's classified as an amphetamine in large parts of the western world and would be illegal obtain without a prescription.
You're perpetuating "be ashamed of not knowing" instead of encouraging "learn by asking questions".
If you agree, consider upvoting downvoted questions.
And somehow this guy is remembered as a 'genius'...