The article is well written but its title is a click bait. Although the film portrays mathematicians in a negative way and the allegedly hard problem on the blackboard is actually an easy homework exercise that every decent first-year student is able to solve, I don’t think the film has ever gathered any hatred among mathematicians.
Correct, most mathematicians, at least the ones I know, do not actually spend time thinking about Good Will Hunting, but it's the kind of stuff that science writers eat up.
If you want to know a movie that I actually heard mathematicians discussing, it would be "A Beautiful Mind", and then only because some people were complaining about how the minor characters misrepresented the mathematicians and especially how the Princeton Math department was unfairly caricatured in order to create dramatic tension (you need an antagonist, after all).
In reality Nash was treated with incredible generosity and kindness, and was given extreme affordances. For example, he visited Nirenberg at Courant and gave him a stack of hundreds of pages of dense, hand written notes that were the proof of the embedding theorem, and Nirenberg took enormous time to go through it and try to understand what Nash did, and then championed the proof. With no renumeration or credit, just as a professional courtesy and desire to see if the proof is correct. Nash was not easy to work with, but because so many people were willing to devote time to reviewing and correcting the proof -- which took 5 years -- it was eventually published. Moser, Gromov, Chern, and Kuiper all played a massive role, donating huge amounts of their personal time in order to help Nash.
But, as is usually the case with real life, it doesn't make for a good 2 hour dramatic story. It's a shame, because the real story is a great story.
I saw it as a sort of science-fiction - imagine living in a world where the smartest intellectuals all struggled to solve basic exercises about graph theory. Really imagine living in such a world - would you not feel frustrated when you tried to explain this basic concept to these supposed experts and they just didn't get it? The main character must have felt like he was going crazy!
> The muster roll for the garrison of Calais in 1357 shows not only the names of men-at-arms and archers but also the support roles needed: mason, locksmith, fletcher (a maker of arrows), bowyer (a maker of bows), plumber, blacksmith, wheelwright, cooper (maker of barrels), ditch digger, boatman, carter and carter’s boy. One record belongs to a tiler – Walter Tyler. Was this the future rebel leader of 1381, Wat Tyler?
I didn’t know that the surnames Cooper, Carter and Tyler were originated from different kinds of artisans. I didn’t know that there are names for makers of arrows, bows and wheels either. What is carter’s boy? A bellboy for a cart?
A wild guess: perhaps it was the Russian authority, not the site owners, who blocked the traffic. Collective action is usually inefficient. If something suddenly happens in a large scale, more often than not it is caused by a few influential entities.
No, Russian authorities blocked just few critical sites and they all are listed in special registry. Internet is more or less freely available in Russia. The only big things they blocked are YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. And some specific media in Russian. Media in English like WSJ, NYT are freely available.
I'm talking about Cloudflare settings or other blockers.
> Evidently, the missing feature of all e-readers is the addition of bellows.
Nah. I'd say the missing feature of all e-readers is multiple screens bound as a pamphlet that allows users to compare the contents on different pages easily.
It is not a matter of what you think it is a logical fact, part of the definition if you will.
What you call concrete - were the origins of math as we know it. Geometry, astronomy, metaphysics etc they all had in common fundamental abstract thing that we call math today.
Saying “math got abstract” is like saying “a tree got wooden”. Because when it was a seed - it wasn’t yet a tree in a full sense.
Discussions of this sort can easily get chaotic, because people tend to conflate intuitiveness and concreteness. Sometimes the whole point of abstraction is to make a concept clearer and more intuitive. The distinction between polynomial function and polynomial is an example.
Somewhat tangential to the discussion: I have once read that Richard Feynman was opposed to the idea (originally due to Karl Popper) that falsifiability is central to physics, but I haven't read any explanation.
Did the scientists deliberately break the bones of the rabbits to perform the tests? I understand that there has to be a necessary evil, and the rabbits here can at least recover from bone fractures, while lab animals in other research projects may get infected with some diseases and die painfully. Yet, I still find the scene of breaking the legs of the rabbits one by one quite troubling.
Anyway, I hope this glue gun project can finally succeed. My grandmother had a broken femur a year before she passed away. Although she could still walk with a walking frame after surgery, the irreversible loss of mobility was undoubtedly frustrating for her.
> a centuries-old tax loophole, abolished in April, that catered to the global rich. The nondomiciled—or non-dom status, as it is known—allowed foreigners living in the U.K. to pay tax only on what they earned domestically. Profits made abroad were ignored unless brought into the U.K.
I don't understand. Why is this a loophole? Why is money earned abroad and kept abroad taxable not by a foreign government but by the UK government?
In the US you pay taxes in the state where you earn the income and where you live. So for example if you own a pass-though tax corporation and it earns income in all states then you must file and pay taxes in all states.
We (the UK) have a very extensive set of double taxation treaties too. The point of non-dom status is that it doesn't even matter if your earnings were taxed elsewhere: they're still not liable in the UK.
It’s standard in Europe and many other countries to tax their “tax residents” on their worldwide income. The tricky part is that sometimes that external income is also taxed at source, but this is usually taken care of by tax treaties, which means that you pay the higher of the tax rates, but only once.
Most countries tax worldwide income for the tax residents. Where the US is different is that US citizens need to report their income (and sometimes pay taxes) even if they don’t live in the US.
You may be breaking the law. It’s common to owe taxes on world wide income in your country of tax residence. I imagine this is the same across the EU but open to be corrected
You mentioned Estonia in another comment - it might be the case that Estonia is a special case or has a scheme for attracting talent that doesn’t include worldwide tax
I see now that most countries do tax worldwide income, just that most of the time they have DTA agreements so you can offset tax paid in other countries against your tax bill.
Because it allows people to very easily funnel their income through offshore companies, and avoid being taxed on it because it’s “earned” in Cyprus or Cayman Islands.
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