This guy has a background in computer science, but taught himself biology to spearhead the regenerative medicine movement. If I'm not mistaken, he published a book in biology with no formal credentials (16 years after receiving his BA in computer science), after which Cambridge honored him with a PhD in the subject.
Just to precise if you were confused like me, Cambridge gave him an actual PhD in Biology based on the book - meaning the book satisfied all the prerequisites of a PhD at Cambridge and he had to do a viva - not just an honorary degree.
The way a Cambridge PhD works, I believe – and I think this is the same across the UK – is that the only things you actually have to do are;
a) write a thesis
b) find examiners (internal and external) who agree to examine you; if you're a grad student this is your advisor's job. The examination is by thesis review followed by pass/pass-with-corrections/fail oral exam. It can take as long as it needs to (typically three to four hours), and is in private; it's not like public defenses elsewhere, which are for show, this is a real live-fire exam and I know people who have failed
c) pass
d) ... that's it; there is no part d)
In particular, there are no quals or other requirements; the degree is an old-school medieval masterwork deal. You submit your thesis and get examined on it. Typically you write your thesis through an apprenticeship to your advisor, but that's not actually required, it's just conventional; in Aubrey's case, the thesis was the book and the research proceeded by unusual means over a long period of time. Nevertheless, he got examined in the same way everyone else does, he passed like everyone else did, so he has his PhD.
(source: my own memory, I know Aubrey and have worked with him on a couple of non-science things fifteen years ago, and I got my PhD from Cambridge through the traditional route of being a grad student – thesis at https://aspace.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/218854?show=...)
So then amateur mathematician is a bit misleading? It sounds like this guy is a marvelous person at whatever he does. How can he be an amateur ANYTHING but have a PhD?
I find that I’m much more open to teaching myself just about anything now. Years of learning every new thing under the sun in the software world will do that.
Just don’t piss him off. Just got done reading “Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue.” Starts a bit slow and pretentious, but once it gets going... I dislike Thiel immensely, but hole-lee-shit he pulled off one of the most complicated, ruthless, and complete revenge plots I’ve ever heard of. That he kept secret for NINE YEARS while planning and executing (quite literally) his scheme.
Even if you know the story well, the book is worth a read or listen.
Thiel's a brilliant person who's misguided in regards to some things - a few bad ideas shouldn't particularly mean a person should be shunned entirely.
from a political perspective, no. if you care about actual technological accomplishments, as a technologist, peter thiel's endorsement should matter a lot.
Aubrey de Grey is chief science officer and co-founder at the SENS Research Foundation, which is the only charity that I personally support because I think it has small resources compared to the potential good it could do to increase healthy life and reduce human suffering.
* Half a million people die each year and 400 million fall ill [with malaria]
* 70% of them are children under 5
* #1 killer of pregnant women
* Malaria is preventable
Malaria nets cost $2. Antimalarial drugs are dirt cheap in the developing world. If you want to impact human suffering and increase human health, this is a good place to start. Not with trying to extend the long and already pleasant lives of rich people in the West.
The short answer is that there are lots of people and lots of resources. It’s not going to hurt if some of those resources work on problems that you don’t think have a high priority.
I bet you can find plenty of people who aren’t working to solve any problems. Why don’t you berate them instead of someone who picked a problem that you think is less important.
That assumes your goal is to maximize utility with all humans as interchangeable. On the other hand, I'm more interested in my own life and longevity than people with malaria, as a result I'm more interested in this type of work.
It's also, in a sense, an unfair argument. You could say the same thing about any other startup. "Oh your goal is to create some new app/service/software? Why not instead focus your efforts on preventing malaria?" The fact that this startup is focused on longevity should not make it more deserving of your above criticism.
The way we think of flu in the west is roughly similar to how Africans think of malaria: a pain in the butt but not the end of the world.
Imagine what we would do if rich Africans arrived and started handing out face masks during flu season. We'd probably do what Africans do with malaria nets: say thanks and throw them in a drawer.
For those who don't know, Givewell is a charity devoted to evaluating charities and writing recommendations for the most efficient and effective use of your donation money.
There are a lot of charities handing out mosquito nets in a driveby fashion. There are not many charities working closely enough with local communities to ensure that those mosquito nets will actually be used, and they won’t be turned into fishing nets instead. If you donate to malaria prevention, make sure it’s a truly hands-on charity.
> “There are two ways to make the world a better place. You can decrease the suck, and you can increase the awesome… And I do not want to live in a world where we only focus on suck and never think about awesome.” - Hank Green
You are advocating for a crude, and disturbing, form of utilitarianism here. Ultimately, I’m a moral relativist, so I even though I can’t say another point of view is “more correct” when it comes to morality, I think engaging some effort and discernment in choosing a moral system is “good.”
That said, connecting this utilitarian reasoning to the guidelines of what research to pursue, never mind the moral aspect would lead to an impoverished field of science.
On the everyday perspective, if one is suffering from ill health, but not from poverty and malaria, the idea that concern for your suffering should be set aside until the numeric quantification of the suffering of other populations is brought in line with your own, lacks compassion.
Value systems that lack compassion defeat their own purpose.
Graph Theory, unlike number theory, is a strangely shallow subject. By this I mean that a lot of the results don’t require a large number of previous results (there’s definitely some).
Compare this to number theory, where every interesting extant problem appears to require ten years study.
(I realise people may infer a value judgement from shallow/deep, but none is intended.)
>> Compare this to number theory, where every interesting extant problem appears to require ten years study.
I don't often come here to comment but as someone in progress on an original research masters in number theory I can say this is utter bullshit. I assume your 'interesting' qualification (somehow) excludes obvious candidates like Landau's problems [0]. Some examples. I was taught about the ABC conjecture as an undergrad. You can easily teach the Brun sieve [1] method of working out that the sum of the reciprocal of the twin primes converges. Novel solutions to Diophantine problems are sometimes accessible to undergrads. Richard K. Guy wrote a whole book on unsolved problems in NT, some of which have been solved using undergraduate number theory and someone's upper bound you can just use (as easy as apt-get installing this_dope_bound). You can start reading papers without a PhD, never mind ten years of study. I think it's possible to get an utterly unrepresentative sample of either field by only sticking to "elementary" results. There are some extraordinarily subtle results in graph theory! Conversely, you can find NT problems amenable to elementary techniques [2].
I’ll defer to your superior experience here. Only done fairly introductory number theory and graph theory stuff. That was just the impression I got from what I’d studied.
The discovery was made by Aubrey de Grey, the same person who believes that humans will eventually live past 1,000. Weird!
> [de Grey] found his way to the chromatic number of the plane problem through a board game. Decades ago, de Grey was a competitive Othello player, and he fell in with some mathematicians who were also enthusiasts of the game. They introduced him to graph theory, and he comes back to it now and then. “Occasionally, when I need a rest from my real job, I’ll think about math,” he said. Over Christmas last year, he had a chance to do that.
Interesting tidbit, there was a bug in the computer assisted part of the proof (now fixed):
"Many thanks to Brendan McKay and Gordon Royle for letting me know overnight that they had successfully 4-coloured my 1567er; as a result I found a bug in the part of my code that implements the relaxation described in section 5.4 and now it agrees. "
Aubrey de Grey is much more than just an Amateur Mathematician, I highly recommend Rob Reid's podcast episode with him: https://after-on.com/episodes/020
In my experience, being an amateur mathematician is more fun that doing it professionally, and potentially just as productive. You don't get nearly as much time for math, so you make the most of it and work only on the most interesting problems as opposed to just writing another paper. There's no time for beating your head against the wall, so you just do it when you're inspired, which is how problems get solved anyway.
Is that a generic claim? I'm making a specific, counterintuitive, and empirical claim about productivity and work-style of mathematicians, having been on both sides. Even for professional mathematicians, the solution to a problem can come all at once, while one is not even actively pursuing it, which begs the question of the purpose of beating your head against the wall when doing math. For just one example amongst many, see the story of Yitang Zhang, who made his breakthrough in establishing the first finite bound on gaps between prime numbers, while out at a barbeque and having largely given up on the problem after two years of effort.
Most mathematical results would be unreachable by amateurs due to the sheer amount of background knowledge, especially of existing literature, required to make progress on a problem (and in some cases to even understand the statement of the problem, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodge_conjecture).
Elementary graph theory and combinatorics are somewhat outliers in this regard, as there is not so much "theory" per se that one has to build on or work with. Tim Gowers's "Two Cultures" essay is an interesting read on this topic: https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2cultures.pdf
I think for a large number of people, myself included, the "Eureka!" moment often occurs when you're least focused on the problem at hand. I remember in college, studying EE, I was struggling to make sense of how a flip-flop worked (the basis of a register). My ah-ha moment was literally in the shower.
If I've been working on a problem at work for too long, I'll often stop working on it and just work on something else, because I know that tomorrow when I take a shower or when I'm walking to work the next day I'll figure it out in my head.
Readit News
He's also Thiel backed.
Just to precise if you were confused like me, Cambridge gave him an actual PhD in Biology based on the book - meaning the book satisfied all the prerequisites of a PhD at Cambridge and he had to do a viva - not just an honorary degree.
That's quite an impressive fellow.
a) write a thesis
b) find examiners (internal and external) who agree to examine you; if you're a grad student this is your advisor's job. The examination is by thesis review followed by pass/pass-with-corrections/fail oral exam. It can take as long as it needs to (typically three to four hours), and is in private; it's not like public defenses elsewhere, which are for show, this is a real live-fire exam and I know people who have failed
c) pass
d) ... that's it; there is no part d)
In particular, there are no quals or other requirements; the degree is an old-school medieval masterwork deal. You submit your thesis and get examined on it. Typically you write your thesis through an apprenticeship to your advisor, but that's not actually required, it's just conventional; in Aubrey's case, the thesis was the book and the research proceeded by unusual means over a long period of time. Nevertheless, he got examined in the same way everyone else does, he passed like everyone else did, so he has his PhD.
(source: my own memory, I know Aubrey and have worked with him on a couple of non-science things fifteen years ago, and I got my PhD from Cambridge through the traditional route of being a grad student – thesis at https://aspace.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/218854?show=...)
I wasn't familiar with this term; apparently it refers to the "oral defense" of a PhD thesis.
Doesn’t surprise me at all to hear this.
Is having Thiel's association a positive thing still? Serious question.
Even if you know the story well, the book is worth a read or listen.
(Probably anyway, I don't personally know anyone that is Thiel backed)
http://www.SENS.org
* Half a million people die each year and 400 million fall ill [with malaria]
* 70% of them are children under 5
* #1 killer of pregnant women
* Malaria is preventable
Malaria nets cost $2. Antimalarial drugs are dirt cheap in the developing world. If you want to impact human suffering and increase human health, this is a good place to start. Not with trying to extend the long and already pleasant lives of rich people in the West.
it’s an utterly worthless comment. I don’t want waste my time explaining why you’re wrong but I did blog a related response a year ago:
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-...
The short answer is that there are lots of people and lots of resources. It’s not going to hurt if some of those resources work on problems that you don’t think have a high priority.
I bet you can find plenty of people who aren’t working to solve any problems. Why don’t you berate them instead of someone who picked a problem that you think is less important.
It's also, in a sense, an unfair argument. You could say the same thing about any other startup. "Oh your goal is to create some new app/service/software? Why not instead focus your efforts on preventing malaria?" The fact that this startup is focused on longevity should not make it more deserving of your above criticism.
* Half a million die each year of influenza
* Most are very young or very old
* Flu is preventable ($1 face mask)
* Flu is easy to treat in the developing world
The way we think of flu in the west is roughly similar to how Africans think of malaria: a pain in the butt but not the end of the world. Imagine what we would do if rich Africans arrived and started handing out face masks during flu season. We'd probably do what Africans do with malaria nets: say thanks and throw them in a drawer.
For those who don't know, Givewell is a charity devoted to evaluating charities and writing recommendations for the most efficient and effective use of your donation money.
https://theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/31/global-use-o...
> “There are two ways to make the world a better place. You can decrease the suck, and you can increase the awesome… And I do not want to live in a world where we only focus on suck and never think about awesome.” - Hank Green
That said, connecting this utilitarian reasoning to the guidelines of what research to pursue, never mind the moral aspect would lead to an impoverished field of science.
On the everyday perspective, if one is suffering from ill health, but not from poverty and malaria, the idea that concern for your suffering should be set aside until the numeric quantification of the suffering of other populations is brought in line with your own, lacks compassion.
Value systems that lack compassion defeat their own purpose.
Deleted Comment
Compare this to number theory, where every interesting extant problem appears to require ten years study.
(I realise people may infer a value judgement from shallow/deep, but none is intended.)
I don't often come here to comment but as someone in progress on an original research masters in number theory I can say this is utter bullshit. I assume your 'interesting' qualification (somehow) excludes obvious candidates like Landau's problems [0]. Some examples. I was taught about the ABC conjecture as an undergrad. You can easily teach the Brun sieve [1] method of working out that the sum of the reciprocal of the twin primes converges. Novel solutions to Diophantine problems are sometimes accessible to undergrads. Richard K. Guy wrote a whole book on unsolved problems in NT, some of which have been solved using undergraduate number theory and someone's upper bound you can just use (as easy as apt-get installing this_dope_bound). You can start reading papers without a PhD, never mind ten years of study. I think it's possible to get an utterly unrepresentative sample of either field by only sticking to "elementary" results. There are some extraordinarily subtle results in graph theory! Conversely, you can find NT problems amenable to elementary techniques [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landau%27s_problems
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brun%27s_theorem
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_reciprocity
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=graph+theory%2...
Afterthought: I wonder what caused the decline in the 80's (also true for other branches of math)
Deleted Comment
> [de Grey] found his way to the chromatic number of the plane problem through a board game. Decades ago, de Grey was a competitive Othello player, and he fell in with some mathematicians who were also enthusiasts of the game. They introduced him to graph theory, and he comes back to it now and then. “Occasionally, when I need a rest from my real job, I’ll think about math,” he said. Over Christmas last year, he had a chance to do that.
"Many thanks to Brendan McKay and Gordon Royle for letting me know overnight that they had successfully 4-coloured my 1567er; as a result I found a bug in the part of my code that implements the relaxation described in section 5.4 and now it agrees. "
Source: https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2018/04/10/aubrey-de-grey-the...
Elementary graph theory and combinatorics are somewhat outliers in this regard, as there is not so much "theory" per se that one has to build on or work with. Tim Gowers's "Two Cultures" essay is an interesting read on this topic: https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2cultures.pdf
Animations showing how the larger graphs are built from smaller graphs would be amazing and illustrative for mortal non-mathematical-geniuses.