Not even college, high school. Really misleading/unfortunate title.
As an aside, why would anyone need to drop out of anything to become a poet?
It’s myth-making, and shouldn’t be confused with “dropping out to take care of your sick parent” or “dropping out and going to work at McDonald’s”.
I believe Einstein dropped out of high school and traveled a bit through Italy.
We definitely need a world where more young people can drop out for a few years.
Where's the myth making?
Looking into it, I think they actually translate their version of it as GED too:
https://www.ice.go.kr/en/cm/cntnts/cntntsView.do?mi=10019&cn...
Are you talking about his family specifically, or South Korea in general? What makes it extremely strong or privileged?
The fact that his parents were math and literature professors who entertained him dropping out of school to write poetry. If I had done that my parents would have offered me exactly three choices, get a job, go back to school, or pack your bags and pay your own rent which would have forced me to get a job, understandably so because as working class people they didn't have the resources to sponsor me for another decade while I go soul searching
Sinply put, most working class parents simply don't have the financial respurces to support an older child's artistic pursuits. It is a privilege, i.e., an _advantage_, to have those means and werewithal to do so.
My point being that it’s not about finances, it’s not that much more difficult for most working class families to support an extra mouth to feed, especially when it’s an adult. It’s more about the difference in perspective and future financial stability.
While typing it, I realized it is actually more expensive in US than just a mouth to feed. Medical insurance, car insurance, car payments (you need a car), all add up to much more.
I would say that was a pretty brave decision, or perhaps he is special
You've probably seen that thing where ChatGPT cracked Enigma[0]. It used several orders of magnitude more computational power than a Bombe (even given Moore's Law, still thousands of times more electrical power), and still took two dozen times longer. You would literally be better off doing brute-force search with a German dictionary. Thus is it with mathematics: a brute-force search is usually cheaper and better than trying to use a language model.
Terry Tao is one of the staunchest knowledgeable advocates of GPT models in mathematical research, and afaik he doesn't even bother trying to use the models for proof search. It's like trying to build a house with a box of shoes: sure, the shoe is technically more versatile because you can't use a hammer for tightening bolts (the shoe's sole has enough friction to do this) or foot protection (the shoe is the right shape for this) or electrical isolation (the bottom surface of the shoe is largely rubber), but please just use a hammer if you want to manipulate nails.
[0]: https://www.techradar.com/news/we-watched-an-ai-crack-the-en... – and I know that's not the original ChatGPT®, but I am not rewarding this company for such a wasteful and pointless publicity stunt.
There are very few people in pure math that care about transformers; they have had practically zero impact on the sort of research mathematics that the Fields Medal is concerned with.
"Don't be curmudgeonly."
You're responding to an after action review comment by moderator as to what might have caused the flag.
Seriously, a well written article including the accessible explanations of his work. Plus, LoL funny. Thank you.
The B.S. changed my life. I graduated, you will too.
So grateful to the late Jim Simons for funding basic research and its popularization (and Quanta Mag.)!
Even if we accept he didn't he still went to college and had an unusual experience as an undergrad in being mentored by an excellent mathematician.
That he took a gap year in h.s. doesn't seem that noteworthy to me.
He dropped out to become a poet – now he’s won a Fields Medal (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37010709 - Aug 2023 (75 comments)
He dropped out to become a poet – now he’s won a Fields Medal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31985400 - July 2022 (136 comments)
I wonder if this helpful service of integrating past comments on the same story ould be easily automated by looking for repeat URLs (and perhaps clustering old and new comments to integrate them so they can be presented as topical threads).
People do this because there are certain admission categories where the university only looks at the test results. So they go “okay, by not going to school, my child can fully focus on exam instead of wasting time on useless subjects like art and PE. And school math curriculum is too easy anyway”
This really saddens me because schools should be more than gateways to universities, but I digress.
> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4064129
How does this paper relate to GP's comment?
Universities should be looking at more and discouraging 1 dimensional applicants
Sure. Like there is a whole field of consultants who would help your child to develop a suitable profile.
Moreover, I the US I heard there is an industry for generating experiences for the "young minds" (if their parents are rich enough) e.g. discovering rennaissance via a trip to Italy etc.
Also remember the tennis scam for admissions? Gordon Ernst from Georgetown U.
I navigated the system alone for myself then again to help her after I had learned from all my college friends. We both went to “prestigious private schools” with single digit acceptance rates and have similarly “prestigious” jobs
Here’s the truth: yes, like everything else in this world it’s a LOT easier with money. But it’s not impossible if you’re willing to understand the expectations and put in the work to meet them.
Not really convincing. How many poor kids did not even come to an understanding of how the admission system works? How many kids did not even know what work was to be put in?
I am also someone born at the bottom (my first passport was a convention of 1951 passport), who went to a world famous university. As I've gotten older, I've realized it's not really a useful way to think about it. We like to say "you can do it if you really try", but it's just not true. Not only is it not true, it's a thought-ending statement that makes it easier for rich kids and harder for poor kids, because why would you need to support the poor kids if they can just work really hard?
Even you have to be able to see that you got lucky. When I applied, the entrance rate for my course was about 8%. I had no idea that I could have tried easier courses, or that I could have filled the form in slightly differently for a better shot. A single-digit acceptance rate is a lottery. You could do everything the same again and not get in. You don't realize it when you get in, because you happen to get questions that you can answer, but there's a heck of a lot of questions an Oxford professor can ask an 18 year old that will make him look bad.
When I arrived, of course all the other kids were ordinary upper middle class kids. People went to feeder schools where they teach you how to do the Oxbridge interview. People who didn't grow up pinching every penny. What happened to the poor, hard-working kids? They're mostly not there.
Optimizing hard for some rat race for some soulless (or soul crushing) office jobs among high functioning sociopaths that management inevitably always is. Most of those folks are not properly happy by any measure, thats not a win in life to end up there nor something to respect.
We are in rather unique period of time, especially folks here, that life fulfillment and happiness can be achieved for almost everybody and not just some top 0.1% if correct direction is taken. How about we realized that and focused more on actually long term important aspects of life?
(here is another guy who went the proverbial rags-to-modest-riches on my own but I would never had such mindset, when talking about successes of my life its about countries I've travelled, people I've met and intense experiences that shaped me more than career paths taken)
I live in a bit of a bubble where pretty much every kid's parents are professionals. Some of these people are off to London before the kids are in school, and arrive back home after they are asleep.
People spend a lot of money on top of private school to get a tutor in order to get into the grammar schools. This is a pure loss for society: the wrong kids get in, since not everyone can afford to learn this particular test. And money is spent on reducing the kids' free time for exploration.
How many others have tried to put the work you did and didn't achieve it?
I think that's the crux of it, being possible doesn't mean anything if it shuts out the majority of the ones who attempt it. It's possible to become a professional athlete and still a lot more kids fail to achieve that even if they put the work for it. Contrary to being a professional athlete, good education is both much more accessible and much more needed.
Exactly because you managed to achieve it that I believe there should be more empathy for how fucked up the system is, imagine how much less suffering you would have gone through if there was a better way? Why not work for it to be a better way even though it's already possible?
At least here in the US:
In academics, a grade of A is better than the rest yet still some independent or from outside school results can mean more than grades and even make poor grades irrelevant.
Some examples:
E.g., for getting into a selective college, SAT Math scores (from outside of school) the highest in my high school class made everything else irrelevant. E.g., overlooked my F in Typing!
Actually, the Typing class was very worthwhile and learned touch typing, but the class was nearly all girls, GORGEOUS, who buzzed away with perfect accuracy at maybe 30 characters a second!
E.g., in graduate school, found a problem and in two weeks got a solution accepted right away by Mathematical Programming. Suddenly had an impenetrable shield and all grades and everything else were irrelevant.
E.g., before grad school thought of a problem and had a first solution; in grad school wrote a first draft; wrote and ran the related software; and wrote the document, all independently. Stood for orals and graduated.
Again, course grades are not everything, and good independent work can make everything else irrelevant.
We should remember not to just present results, but to teach, demonstrate and live how to get there more. It's not even abour rich vs. poor education - almost all go through the whole system never seeing this, and for June Huh, sleeper maths genius, meeting that one person changed everything!
My point being that maybe it's not unique sleeper inborn talent, but just learning grit, persistence and well, not being stupid, that will lead to success in life. If one thing doesn't hit, try another. So maybe you don't become a poet, but a math genius, or a soccer player, or a dancer; something else than a TV consumer.
pinewurst•14h ago
dang•9h ago