<p>Don’t the best discoveries come from people whose curiosity is so consuming that they devote themselves heart and soul into exploring ideas no one has tackled before?</p>
<p>Is it possible that sometimes the best discoveries come from those whose jobs and hobbies are one and the same? The ones who find it exciting to spend to spend day and night on that job/hobby?</p>
<p>*I guess I don’t understand how a super-smart student’s potential can be infinite and finite at the same time. *</p>
<p>I guess this is nature vs nurture, but it seems to me nature usually requires some nurturing to get the absolutely best crop.</p>
<p>Inspired by Hunt, I’ve been considering poets and writers of fiction. : ) Would a dilettante like Proust have stood a chance at elite college admissions? I think not. Would he have benefited from such an education? I can’t think how.</p>
<p>Re sally305, #899: There’s a huge gap between what is taught in graduate courses in many sciences and “ideas that no one has tackled before.” In order to get to the ideas that no one has tackled before (a la Feynman as an undergrad), even a genius needs a very capable mentor (e.g. John Slater).</p>
<p>Also, re alh’s #896: There might be an apparent disconnect between my remark about Ralph Ellison on this thread, and my comments on the other thread. I don’t see one, personally. I recognize Ellison as a literary giant. Invisible Man is a work of genius. At the same time, I don’t think it should be taught to high schoolers who are too immature for it. It is a work for adults, or exceptionally mature students (who have never made up 100% of the high school classes I am familiar with).</p>
<p>I know that Feynman learned from Slater and other faculty when he was an undergrad. I know he learned from John Wheeler at Princeton when he was a grad student. I believe that he learned from Julian Schwinger after he (Feynman) finished his Ph.D., although I don’t know whether he learned from conversations with Schwinger, or only from Schwinger’s papers. I believe that Feynman learned from P. A. M. Dirac, from his papers and perhaps from Dirac’s book if it was published soon enough. I think Feynman might have learned from Tomonaga. This pretty much exhausts the list of people that I am certain that Feynman learned from. I can absolutely guarantee that Feynman would have had nothing to learn from me if we had ever met, unless it was something about literature or art.</p>
<p>In my opinion, mathematical subjects, including mathematical physics, are not like history or literature or (most likely) engineering, in terms of who can learn what from whom.</p>
<p>I didn’t mean to insult engineering at CMU. How does its ranking compare with computer science’s ranking at CMU?</p>
<p>I don’t think I made my point clearly. I think of the smartest people as those who innovate, think not just outside but beyond the box, and have an insatiable curiosity about their areas of interest. They are not waiting to be told what to do next. Yes, they can benefit from guidance but at some point their ambitions are completely internalized and not dependent on anyone else. They are off on their own achieving their (presumably) infinite potential. But there seems to be a belief here that these people have to have X amount of MIT-level mentoring to get to this point–otherwise their accomplishments will be far more limited than they would be otherwise.</p>
<p>And yes, absolutely they might work day and night pursuing their passion. (I do think most people would find the lack of variety in such a life “boring,” as was suggested earlier.)</p>
<p>QM: I don’t see any disconnect. Your pov on grim literature has been pretty consistent : ). It just seemed like sort of an insider’s joke that might should be explained. </p>
<p>"I don’t think I made my point clearly. I think of the smartest people as those who innovate, think not just outside but beyond the box, and have an insatiable curiosity about their areas of interest. They are not waiting to be told what to do next. "</p>
<p>Yes, very well said. Which is why I can’t comprehend that these brilliant innovators who can see around corners and see where no man has gone before have a finite list of only a handful of people they could possibly learn from. Every bright-to-brilliant person I personally know sifts through everything he / she comes in contact with for greater insight and meaning or alternatively analogy and creativity. It’s not just “…and these are the 5 people who can ignite that in me and everyone else is useless to me.” </p>
<p>Re sally305, #893: Spending all the time in the lab does not make one a “textureless grind,” in my opinion. Even my colleague who had a cot in the lab so that he could work close to 100% of the time that he was awake was in no way “textureless,” nor was he “grinding.” I don’t actually think that most people would find working that much boring, if they were as caught up in the work as he was. Assessing someone who works in a really dedicated fashion (even if he/she is out of balance) as “textureless” and doing “boring” work underlies what I’ve been writing about, really.</p>
<p>*And yes, absolutely they might work day and night pursuing their passion. (I do think most people would find the lack of variety in such a life “boring,” as was suggested earlier.) *</p>
<p>Most people don’t have the luxury of choosing jobs they would do for free. I find people that consumed by passion to be the very opposite of boring. ; ) ; ) ; )</p>
<p>QM,CMU computer science is highly ranked, one of the top programs. For graduate school, US News ranks it #1, tied with MIT, Stanford , and Berkeley. CMU engineering is ranked #5 overall for graduate schools.</p>
<p>I was curious about CMU’s faculty in the physics department since there has been such a focus on physics. <a href=“Faculty - Department of Physics - Carnegie Mellon University”>http://www.cmu.edu/physics/people/faculty/index.html</a>
The most PhD’s of the full professors: a few from MIT, a couple from Caltech, Harvard and Princeton, . Other schools: Chicago, UCLA, CMU, Penn, Iowa State, Lehigh, Berkeley,Georgia, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, etc. Also from Germany, Russia. Surely, Ellen Sue could get SOMETHING from these people?</p>
<p>If you recall the mention of my calc prof, John von X, there is a bit more to say about him: He told our class that he had an opportunity to meet as a grad student with John von Neumann (brilliant mathematician and computer scientist), to discuss the Ph.D. thesis research that he, John von X, was doing. John von Neumann listened politely, and at the end of my prof’s exposition, he said, “When you reach <em>this</em> point, I think you will run into some difficulty.” Well, at the end of two years of continuous hard work, John von X reached that point. He did run into some difficulty. In fact, so much so that he had to drop that thesis topic and shift to something else entirely. You might say that John von Neumann psyched him out of being able to solve the difficulty. I suppose that if someone were working on something that John von Neumann thought was difficult, they might throw in the towel a bit prematurely. But I suspect that John von Neumann was just <em>that</em> insightful, and the difficulty was really serious.</p>
<p>At a seminar that I attended, a prof from the University of Chicago once remarked that some exceptionally bright people are not simply a bit brighter than others, they are orders of magnitude brighter. I am confident that that remark applied to John von Neumann, even when he was young.</p>
<p>Of course, people can do great work without a “top” undergraduate background. There are many, many examples of that. Whether their backgrounds have in any way limited them is hard to say. Most people absorb a lot from the faculty where they do their undergrad work.</p>
<p>(I thought CMU’s computer science was ranked tied first–actually, I thought it might have been solo first.)</p>
<p>So, to finally answer sevmom’s question about Ellen Sue: Yes, probably she could learn quite a lot. Velda Nancy von Neumann? Maybe not so much.</p>
<p>Wonder if QM can summarize her position in two short sentences in one post.</p>
<p>This thread is going all over the map. Sometimes, ha, even seeming like stream of consciousness. An idea from here, a named person there, some idea that something speculated on, if not challenged, may now be treated as a fact springboard.</p>
<p>MIT is a great school. They can take 8% of their applicants. They have classrooms to fill, professors to occupy, a campus scene to keep vibrant. Not sure outliers should be specially coddled, if they don’t pass through the ordinary admissions funnel.</p>
<p>I think what some might be better satisfied by is the notion of a post secondary institute where these special kids who don’t seem to fit into a multi-faceted campus environment can go study all the time. </p>
<p>I don’t think it’s really cut-and-dry. One US. chemistry olympics team member wrote how he benefited from the dept. of chemistry at NYU as an undergrad. (NYU is a great school, but chem is not one of its strongsuits.) The smaller feel was important to him. And maybe he got some extra attention. I met an applied physics prof at MIT who was very happy with his undergrad education at UCLA (though that guy was not advanced beyond AP physics C in high school). As a prefrosh, I told one of the chem professors at MIT that I was leery about MIT because I though a liberal arts education may be critically important for a scientist (surprise, surprise people), and he actually agreed. (Obviously, despite this drawback I came to MIT anyway.) I’ve met other people who are convinced the environment at MIT was critical for their success. Some of this is field dependent, too. </p>
<p>By the same token, I’m not at the level where I was above the faculty going into college, but at one of the top 10 schools I looked at I basically would have only a year-and-a-half of classes left to take in my best subject, including grad classes. I guess I could have double majored or spent more time in lab. And grad classes are not always well-done, since education of grad students in the classroom is only considered important in theoretical subjects. Sometimes, even at top schools, they are just thrown together and are little more than a journal club. For non-theoretical subjects, PI’s want to get their people in the lab. But the main point here is that the faculty may be at a high level, but there may not be enough students with the interests and abilities to take the class.</p>
<p>I don’t think the people who think “outside of the box” need to be taught how to think really (though they undoubtedly learn by watching different approaches), but they certainly benefit from curriculum which exercises that talent. For instance, it helps if the homework is hard enough that it requires you to be a little imaginative. Its analogous to the difference between AP physics C and AB-- in AB they give you the formulas and then tell you how to use it, in Physics C their is more emphasis on derivation and I would expect the problems to be harder. In college, MIT had a version closer to Physics C, and then one totally beyond that which was far more rigorous.</p>
<p>Like I said before, the question of how the admissions decision might affect the student (let alone the university and the world) is complex. Curriculum and the level of the faculty are just two facets of it. The other part is how they evaluate the “message” they have been sent. If someone who wants to be a physician scientist sees premed students get selected for schools over them despite a large disparity in academic ability, maybe the rejectee re-evaluates his/her approach to school and their priorities. Maybe they would be better off coasting in school and filling up on other activities to advance their career. And maybe they think it’s BS but decide that decisions in academia are random and not a meritocracy, and therefore why not pursue more lucrative opportunities. Yeah, people change course for all sorts of reasons, but its not exactly ideal for the university itself to sour people on the pursuit of knowledge. </p>
<p>Or I could do it for you. You have a simple point and all the Feynman and Ellison and sat scoring scales that don’t exist and worries about special needs kids and who’s so devastated they can’t go study there that they reevaluate their life’s purpose and whether or not engineering is more valued or academic strengths are less valued or some professor complained about something or other, ad infinitum, is NOT convincing.</p>
<p>But be forewarned that if you go for pie in the sky, I’m going to ask what knowedge it’s based on. Not speculation, assumptions or “I’d do admissions differently,” when you really don’t know how admissions does it now. </p>
<p>* And maybe they think it’s BS but decide that decisions in academia are random and not a meritocracy, and therefore why not pursue more lucrative opportunities.*</p>
<p>I believe this</p>
<p>Yeah, people change course for all sorts of reasons, but its not exactly ideal for the university itself to sour people on the pursuit of knowledge.</p>
<p>“Would a dilettante like Proust have stood a chance at elite college admissions? I think not. Would he have benefited from such an education? I can’t think how.”</p>
<p>Well, then, there’s no problem to solve, if he wouldn’t have benefited and wouldn’t get in anyway.</p>
<p>" In order to get to the ideas that no one has tackled before (a la Feynman as an undergrad), even a genius needs a very capable mentor (e.g. John Slater)."</p>
<p>What if the mentor passed away? Or decided he wanted to move to California? Or retire? Or take a year to sail around the world? It seems that you’re putting way too much on the influence of one specific person who needs to be “guaranteed” accessible. </p>
<p>“Yeah, people change course for all sorts of reasons, but its not exactly ideal for the university itself to sour people on the pursuit of knowledge.”</p>
<p>Only a whiner would be “soured on the pursuit of knowledge” in this circumstance. </p>