
Lessons I wish I had been taught (1996) - hargup
http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-lessons.html
======
bluenose69
I have a colleague who gives great talks. There are three reasons they are
great. (1) The science is great. (2) He speaks engagingly and explains his
(complex) material very well.(3) He _always_ includes a citation and some very
specific remarks on the _single_ paper that I can read, to learn more. This
third thing is the most important to the growth of the academic field, because
solitary study is usually required to make progress, and nobody has time to
read dozens of papers in a field that is not quite their own.

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B1FF_PSUVM
_" An audience is like a herd of cows, moving slowly in the direction they are
being driven towards. If we make one point, we have a good chance that the
audience will take the right direction; if we make several points, then the
cows will scatter all over the field."_

Then proceeds to make several points. Good stuff, though. Rule, exception,
moo.

~~~
ianai
He was talking about a lecture. A webpage in this form is a static entity that
you can go to and come back from multiple times and leave with as many
thoughts.

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wodahs02
The Feynman method is a nice hack. Good mental model.

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mixmastamyk
I found number 10 (old age) interesting in that I'm approaching it, hehe. I
understood what he wrote for the most part, but could have used a bit more
exposition. Anyone want to try describing it, perhaps from another angle?

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csl
> Every mathematician has only a few tricks

Can anyone in the know illuminate this with some examples?

~~~
ianai
My favorite complex analysis book makes repeated use of the same infinite sum
throughout. He's probably referring to such things as well as logical tactics.
There are even books written on this sort of thing. I think you can find them
as "tactics for problem solving" or some such.

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smarks
This was brilliant. Thanks for (re)posting it.

I had never heard of Rota before. I'll have to read more about him. It's a bit
sad that he lived for only a couple years after this lecture, dying at the
relatively young age of 66. (Wikipedia)

~~~
aardvarks
Rota was quite the celebrity, at least among students. In addition to advanced
classes in his specialty, he taught differential equations, which was required
for at least two thirds of undergraduates, so everyone knew him. Each semester
he would pay a diffeq student to have a can of Coke ready for him at each
class, so he could drink it while he lectured. Also, anyone who asked a
question during lecture (a room of ~350 people) would get a free Hershey's bar
after class. That he had worked in (and sometimes taught) philosophy as well
as math was kind of the icing on the cake.

There was also a persistent rumor that he'd once given a diffeq multiple
choice exam (scored like the SAT, so that a fraction of a point was deducted
for every wrong answer) on which the average score was 1 or 2 percent, ie
simply handing in a blank exam would probably have given a passing score. But
I never confirmed that.

~~~
sn9
Speaking of Rota and differential equations, he also wrote a rant about the
terrible state of teaching differential equations [0].

[0]
[https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf](https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf)

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spennant
Very odd to see this here. I had recently been Googling the writings of the
late professor. He as a few lists like this out there.

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kelukelugames
>Everyone in the audience has come to listen to your lecture with the secret
hope of hearing their work mentioned.

People are narcissistic as hell.

~~~
LionessLover
Do you like it when I reply to your comment, thereby indicating that I read
it, and by replying I further show that it was more important to me than many
other comments I didn't reply to?

That's what you were hoping for when you wrote _your_ reply, didn't you?

:-)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Surely your comment only works if you're 'famous' on HN.

~~~
LionessLover
So you think people comment and don't care if nobody ever responds to them?
That they don't like getting reactions (not counting the negative ones - which
of course according to you nobody cares about either, unless you are "famous"
\- because for some inexplicable reason(ing) only famous people like positive
and fear negative responses)?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
No, people do like get a response as you suggest.

I was trying to suggest as an analogue of the situation in the OP, that was
being satirically commented on, that in order to properly mirror the situation
_your_ comment would need to come from someone with renown in the current
locus. If people are really listening to the lecture hoping to be namechecked
then it would be because they consider the lecturer to be a worthy in some
way, surely?

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amelius
The link points to the middle of the article.

~~~
caipre
It's because it's been submitted before:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220746)

~~~
aab0
Yes, but if you're trying to get around the duplicate detector, you can
usually just append a query string like '?2'. Or, if the server tries to
interpret query strings and that would be bad, it'd be friendlier to the read
to instead use a non-existent div like '#2'. Bypasses the duplicate detector,
specifies how many resubmissions, and doesn't jump the reader somewhere in the
article. (Although I should note that I think the one OP chose is one of the
two best ones, so no real harm done.)

