Quote: Bertrand Russell's anecdote

To return to my grandmother’s family … the … sister, Lady Charlotte Portal was … apt to express herself unfortunately. On one occasion when she had to order a cab for three people, she thought a hansom would be too small and a four-wheeler too large, so she told the footman to fetch a three-wheeled cab. On another occasion, the footman, whose name was George, was seeing her off at the station when she was on her way to the Continent. Thinking that she might have to write to him about some household matter she suddenly remembered that she did not know his surname. Just after the train had started she put her head out of the window and called out, ‘George, George, what’s your name?’ ‘George, My Lady’, came the answer. By that time he was out of earshot.

-Bertrand Russell, “Autobiography”

Advice for students

• Be challenged. Seek material at the level and pace appropriate for you. Learn with people who aren’t all dumber (or smarter) than you.
• If you’re motivated to learn or build something, do it. If you’re not motivated, don’t force yourself.
• Be aware of but not afraid of what you don’t yet know.
• Some things can’t be learned from textbooks because the textbooks don’t exist, e.g. decision theory.
• Some concepts take a while to really absorb, possibly years. In the words of John von Neumann, “Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.”
• There’s nothing wrong with funding your studies by borrowing against future earnings as long as you’re not overpaying for your education. Internships are great too.
• Don’t do undergrad if you don’t need to. Subjects like mathematics, computer science, and economics can be learned conveniently and effectively using books, videos, and other resources from the internet.
  • E.g. look at the prerequisites list at a university course webpage to make sure you’re ready for a subject, find a textbook (if one doesn’t suit you try another), find a video lecture series as an optional but helpful supplement, and use Q&A forums online if you get stuck.
  • If you need an academic credential, write a paper with a professor in your city and get it published. The mentorship will be valuable and with just publications and reference letters applying to grad school is an option (see e.g. link).
• If you formally take a course, ideally learn the material by yourself beforehand (paradoxical as that sounds).
• Don’t go to a bad grad school. At the graduate level, low-status schools have poor funding, low research activity, and few students.
• Get a thesis supervisor who is unambiguously an expert in the field.
• Attend economics seminars because they’re a blast.
• When I was 17 my lowest grade was in math and I thought I wasn’t good at it. One year later I was obsessed with it. Things can change.

Quote: Knuth on Dijkstra

One of the pleasures I’ve had over the years is to play four-hands piano music with Edsger. … When we’re playing a Haydn waltz the thing I had to get used to was that Edsger doesn’t count one-two-three, one-two-three it’s always zero-one-two, zero-one-two.

-Don Knuth, 2000

Link: Generated poetry

https://www.reddit.com/user/haikubot-1911/comments/?sort=top

Procedure: Search for groups of sentences that form haikus. Syllable counting can be done with pyphen. Format the haiku-valid text into three lines and do capitalization. Post the poems and measure quality with votes.

Three excellent lecture videos

1. Aakar Patel - English and its influence on our national priorities (2016). This examines the peculiar phenomenon in India where the popular media, due to the distribution of languages spoken and very high advertising revenues, ends up being skewed towards elites and their issues, systematically biasing the propagation of news information.

2. David Starkey - When I hear the word ‘art’, I reach for my gun (2017). Starkey gives a sweeping account of the history of art, in a broad sense, and illuminates the phenomena of Dadaism and modern art.

3. Edsger Dijkstra @ Joint International Seminar on the Teaching of Computing Science (1992). Dijkstra presents an algorithmic problem and walks through a solution based on ideas in A Discipline of Programming, where formal semantics are used to guide the search for an algorithm.

Quote: Maud Ray Kent

Paraphrasing from Macrae’s biography of J. von Neumann:

In 1940 the Germans captured Denmark plus Niels Bohr. A cable arrived in Britain from Otto Frisch’s aunt in Sweden saying, “Met Niels and [wife] Margarethe recently. Both well but unhappy about events. Please inform Cockroft [British nuclear scientist] and Maud Ray Kent”.

Who or what was “Maud Ray Kent”? The British decided it was an anagram for “radyum taken” and thus gave warning that the Germans were moving fast to develop an A-bomb. Perhaps that was the reason the Nazis had occupied Bohr’s Copenhagen, and were capturing Norway and its heavy water too? Someone suggested that Maud might actually stand for “Military Application: Uranium Disintegration”. The British nuclear program commenced under the name “MAUD Committee”, as a tribute to the brilliant anagram.

Down in her home in Kent, Miss Maud Ray, the English governess to Bohr’s children, remained uncontacted because nobody had heard of her.