Plz, no gossip about these people. I know one personally, he would not enjoy this.
Qiaochu Yuan, Akhil Mathew,Will Sawin, Evan O'Dorney, Eric Wofsey: mathprodigies
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Cambridge's Isaac Newton Institute is running a 4-month program on fractional differential equations next year.
I wondered whether Arran Fernandez might be following in the footsteps of Alexander Grothendieck whom colleagues thought was eccentric for accepting a position in the south of France and not in Paris. But it seems that many of Arran's papers have been published in journals which charge their authors to publish, i.e. vanity journals, and to judge from Google Scholar almost all of the citations of papers he has coauthored (the vast majority) have been by...coauthors of said articles, including himself. Still, he HAS published dozens of articles at this early stage of his career, which Ruth Lawrence the other famous British prodigy hadn't, even though she was the top student at Oxford younger than Arran was the top student (youngest ever "Senior Wrangler") at Cambridge.
Arran is also working on Riemann zeta stuff, so who knows, maybe he will do a Perelman-Poincaré or Wiles-Fermat. Andrew Wiles kept it quiet that he was working on Fermat's Last Theorem, and I think what Perelman did with the Poincaré proof was one day he gave it to the world by uploading it to Arxiv, i.e. he didn't use the journal system at all.
I looked at Arran's intro to his PhD dissertation and it seems (from reading between the lines) that he had a poor adviser, best known in recent years for the embarrassment of having claimed to have proved the Lindelof Hypothesis (in a continually updated paper he kept posting to Arxiv) and then found he hadn't. It sounds as though the only person Arran got decent help from was a Romanian professor who holds a chair in Turkey so that may possibly be where the connection with the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus comes from.
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Cambridge runs a superb undergrad maths program (at least as strong as Harvard's and Princeton's and some say it is superior), but they can be awful at PhD level. Fields medallist Caucher Birkar works there in algebraic geometry, but colleagues have told me that because of his class and ethnic background he would have been extremely unlikely to have been accepted at Cambridge as an undergraduate, and unlikely to have been accepted for a place on their "Part Three" (masters' program) or as a PhD candidate - and that if he had been accepted he wouldn't have received encouragement.
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Cambridge runs a superb undergrad maths program (at least as strong as Harvard's and Princeton's and some say it is superior), but they can be awful at PhD level. Fields medallist Caucher Birkar works there in algebraic geometry, but colleagues have told me that because of his class and ethnic background he would have been extremely unlikely to have been accepted at Cambridge as an undergraduate, and unlikely to have been accepted for a place on their "Part Three" (masters' program) or as a PhD candidate - and that if he had been accepted he wouldn't have received encouragement.
I know someone doing their PhD at Cambridge (representation theory) and he says it's great apart from the fact that they sent him back home due to covid
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If they let you in in the first place at whatever level Cambridge can be a great place and often is. But many PhD candidates there are used as helpers for their advisers, and sometimes not on topics their advisers have done a lot of work on or have identified as full of potential after much thought, but simply topics they've been piqued to take a look at out of whim, and the PhD candidates in their relative innocence believe must be deep because a "great man" is looking at them. Then when they get the PhD they find they can't continue in academia because their topic was basically recreational. I am not suggesting this is the norm but I've heard of it happening a few times at Cambridge in combinatorics. There's no problem with considering topics because of whim either, but this is a poor way to steer a PhD candidate. Tbf I've only heard of it happening in pure, not in applied such as PDEs etc.
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Cambridge runs a superb undergrad maths program (at least as strong as Harvard's and Princeton's and some say it is superior), but they can be awful at PhD level. Fields medallist Caucher Birkar works there in algebraic geometry, but colleagues have told me that because of his class and ethnic background he would have been extremely unlikely to have been accepted at Cambridge as an undergraduate, and unlikely to have been accepted for a place on their "Part Three" (masters' program) or as a PhD candidate - and that if he had been accepted he wouldn't have received encouragement.
How does this make sense?
Doesn't Cambridge have many "Part Three" and PhD students from non-white ethnic backgrounds?
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Cambridge runs a superb undergrad maths program (at least as strong as Harvard's and Princeton's and some say it is superior), but they can be awful at PhD level. Fields medallist Caucher Birkar works there in algebraic geometry, but colleagues have told me that because of his class and ethnic background he would have been extremely unlikely to have been accepted at Cambridge as an undergraduate, and unlikely to have been accepted for a place on their "Part Three" (masters' program) or as a PhD candidate - and that if he had been accepted he wouldn't have received encouragement.
How does this make sense?
Doesn't Cambridge have many "Part Three" and PhD students from non-white ethnic backgrounds?Not many who aren't white or ethnic Chinese. A lot has been written about their not taking many black students or for that matter hiring many black lecturers. Recently the situation has improved a little, but while there have been some apologies there continue to be stories right up to the present year. There's also class. Among the British students in undergraduate admissions they (or rather the colleges, because it's the colleges who admit undergrads) occasionally take someone from an other than favoured class background, but this is rare. How it can work is they box-tick for "access" and in some cases praise themselves publicly but they give the student little encouragement or give them anti-encouragement after they've arrived. In math almost all the intake for PhD programs is from Part Three, and about half the intake for Part Three is from students who did the undergrad program, so PhD candidates who weren't Cam undergrads are basically a section of the other half of the Part Three intake. There isn't quite so much of a public relations angle for external Part Three admissions, which is related to how it's not the colleges that decide to admit to Part Three, and so probably even fewer come from non-favoured class backgrounds and yes they are still mostly white or ethnic Chinese although from various countries which is also true of the undergrad intake.
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So many bizarre long posts by ef9c to disparage Cambridge.
b21d and anyone else who is interested: just type "cambridge university black" into Google to find numerous articles about Cambridge's long-time under-admission of black students and about the experiences of black students at that university right up to the present year. I won't post any links here or refer to anything specific because there is so much information available.
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Not every place can be like Harvard and dramatically lower the bar for ethnically challenged candidates ...
So many bizarre long posts by ef9c to disparage Cambridge.
b21d and anyone else who is interested: just type "cambridge university black" into Google to find numerous articles about Cambridge's long-time under-admission of black students and about the experiences of black students at that university right up to the present year. I won't post any links here or refer to anything specific because there is so much information available.
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Only racists, all of whom are intellectually challenged, believe there are inborn differences in the distribution of "general intelligence" by ethnicity.
Not every place can be like Harvard and dramatically lower the bar for ethnically challenged candidates ...
So many bizarre long posts by ef9c to disparage Cambridge.
b21d and anyone else who is interested: just type "cambridge university black" into Google to find numerous articles about Cambridge's long-time under-admission of black students and about the experiences of black students at that university right up to the present year. I won't post any links here or refer to anything specific because there is so much information available.
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How do you explain the population difference between CalTech and colleges that use so-called holistic admissions?
Only racists, all of whom are intellectually challenged, believe there are inborn differences in the distribution of "general intelligence" by ethnicity.
Not every place can be like Harvard and dramatically lower the bar for ethnically challenged candidates ...
So many bizarre long posts by ef9c to disparage Cambridge.
b21d and anyone else who is interested: just type "cambridge university black" into Google to find numerous articles about Cambridge's long-time under-admission of black students and about the experiences of black students at that university right up to the present year. I won't post any links here or refer to anything specific because there is so much information available.
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I know nothing about either the admissions policy or the population at CalTech, and I have never previously heard the expression "holistic admissions". If you believe black babies are born with lower "average" "general intelligence" than white babies, you have a serious problem. I will say nothing further, other than to speculate that your view on the matter may predate whatever you know about policies at CalTech or any other specific US schools.
How do you explain the population difference between CalTech and colleges that use so-called holistic admissions?
Only racists, all of whom are intellectually challenged, believe there are inborn differences in the distribution of "general
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Regarding holistic admissions you can educate yourself here https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/21/holistic-admissions-origin/.
Regarding intelligence and genetics you can educate using the references there https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/intelligence.
I know nothing about either the admissions policy or the population at CalTech, and I have never previously heard the expression "holistic admissions". If you believe black babies are born with lower "average" "general intelligence" than white babies, you have a serious problem. I will say nothing further, other than to speculate that your view on the matter may predate whatever you know about policies at CalTech or any other specific US schools.
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Plz, no gossip about these people. I know one personally, he would not enjoy this.
We are not here to sugarcoat bitter truth or flatter young prodigies who grow up to be just another insignificant adult. This forum is relevant because we do the opposite.
If they're so insignificant, why are you discussing them? Seriously, GTFO.
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The second article starts off by declaiming that intelligence is a "trait" and is therefore obviously worthless.
As for admitting people to university with reference to more than their exam grades, that's irrelevant to the issue, since it is obvious that their experiences in their environment influenced those grades and will also influence how they fare at university.
Regarding holistic admissions you can educate yourself here https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/21/holistic-admissions-origin/.
Regarding intelligence and genetics you can educate using the references there https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/intelligence.I know nothing about either the admissions policy or the population at CalTech, and I have never previously heard the expression "holistic admissions". If you believe black babies are born with lower "average" "general intelligence" than white babies, you have a serious problem. I will say nothing further, other than to speculate that your view on the matter may predate whatever you know about policies at CalTech or any other specific US schools.
