I do have a PhD and agree much more with the parent comment than yours. Granted, my PhD was in math, not CS, so I'm sure the experience was different. For instance:
> there are no problems like this in academia (at least not CS) because it's absolutely impractical (re graduation, tenure, etc.) to set out tackling problems which are intractable.
There's a difference between problems that are intractable and problems that require "grinding and radical unproductivity when the problem really is that hard". Maybe the problems in CS are easier. In math, many of the problems are very much of this flavor, and the point often isn't to solve the original problem but rather to use your investigation into that problem to discover new techniques or more tractable problems that you can solve. Of course, the pace of publication is far slower in math, so I'm sure this is a factor in the choice of problems.
On the other hand, I do mostly agree with this:
> are you also one of those people who takes cold plunges every morning? this myth is what perpetuates the same horrible relationships with shit advisors. it's not supposed to be suffering. it's supposed to be challenging. there's an enormous difference.
Agreed, there should be a difference. Unfortunately, in many modern PhD programs I'm not sure there is much of one....
> Granted, my PhD was in math, not CS, so I'm sure the experience was different
my BS and MS were in (pure) math (my MS thesis is on convergence of the ito integral...) and my PhD is in CS systems. CS outside of theory is worse than an empirical discipline - it's a "throw spaghetti, lasagna, burgers, caesar salad at the wall and see what sticks" discipline. it bears literally no resemblance to math (pure or applied).
> Maybe the problems in CS are easier... Of course, the pace of publication is far slower in math, so I'm sure this is a factor in the choice of problems.
yes and that should tell you everything you need to know - there are kids in my department graduating with 5 first author conference papers (i had "only" 3). how much of those papers do you think is original work really?
Don't really know what point you're trying to make here. Maybe Garnett is more westernized, but that doesn't make it more readable. IMO Garnett's not great (at least for Anna Karenina, which is all I've read by her); from what I've read P&V is more readable than Garnett.
I wouldn't consider the Hodge diamond the "crucial idea from string theory." It's a pretty basic/fundamental concept in geometry and really doesn't a priori have much to do with string theory. The decomposition they give on page 6 probably predates most of the development of string theory.
I "blame" Quantamagazine for this.. upselling string theory via Kontsevich, because I don't think there's anything in this work related to string theory other than the Hodge diamond + related "elementary" symmetries (see my other unedited comment in response to a geometer)
It was probably not intentional, though, and might trigger noone besides snobs like us :)
There's different ways to define "related", here what does Quanta explicitly claim is "related", plausibly without looking maybe they meant historically related but not conceptually related.
Tbf I was maybe a bit indignant over this sentence from TFA:
>The proof _relies_ on ideas imported from the world of string theory. Its techniques are wholly unfamiliar to the mathematicians who have dedicated their careers to classifying polynomials.
They should have said "differential geometry", unless you count Kontsevich himself as a string theorist (maybe he does. I don't know)
From the paper, sec3.1.2:
While historically prevalent in the mirror symmetry and Gromov-Witten literature, the complex
analytic or formal analogues of an F-bundle will not be useful for constructing birational invariants
directly
Later on, however:
One largely unexplored aspect of Gromov-Witten theory is its algebraic flexibility..
I guess we can't really not credit the string theorists if Kontsevich can be so inspired by them :)
My academic work was very close to June Huh's; my Ph.D. thesis was directly inspired by his Fields Medal winning work. His accomplishments have undoubtedly moved the field forward and connected various ostensibly disparate areas of math, not to mention he is one of the clearest writers and speakers in all of mathematics.
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.
I'm assuming you don't have a Ph.D. if it sounds generic to you. I think it's really impossible to explain to somebody who hasn't gone through it how much a Ph.D. changes the way you think.
Whether it's worth the time investment is another matter, however, which I'll leave alone.
I have not been paid because my salary is funded by an NSF grant and they've shut down the payment system and cancelled payments. (It is still down.) I'm not in the social sciences, I'm in mathematics.
The instability this has created has me looking to leave academia as quickly as possible; I'm sure others in similar situations are having the same thoughts. This has wreaked havoc on all of academia.
Thank you for providing extra context! I can see why the unpredictability of the entire system could make people not even consider applying in the future.
Sorry to hear that this happened to you. I hope they will provide some way to sort this out soon.
