I'm not a mathematician, but the story of Yitang Zhang desperately makes me want this paper to be correct.
> Prior to getting back to academia, he worked for several years as an accountant and a delivery worker for a New York City restaurant. He also worked in a motel in Kentucky and in a Subway sandwich shop. A profile published in the Quanta Magazine reports that Zhang used to live in his car during the initial job-hunting days.
While not common, I know of other Chinese diaspora in North America with similar stories.
Many graduates from post Cultural Revolution China left the country in 90's and found the language barrier (and accompanying discrimination) too high to overcome. The man delivering your fried rice might have a PhD.
An unfortunate parallel: the best physics professor (unfortunately, just an adjunct) I ever had was a Russian immigrant. He quit teaching to go run a blini restaurant because it paid way more :(
My calculus professor from university in the late '90s had earlier on won a Lottery Visa to the US. As I understood it he took advantage of it, only to find out that while there he could only find very menial jobs.
He came back to Romania and to Bucharest, which was really good for me and for my then colleagues because he was an excellent professor.
This is so true and still the case. I've seen so many highly skilled immigrants passed over for politics and image reasons... Academia is ruthless but for the wrong reasons.
Why is this :( though? The market is working and filling a market opportunity. Maybe he likes running his own business? Unless he was being discriminated against for being a Russian immigrant and treated unfairly?
Because the world would be better off having people of that calibre making progress on outstanding problems in maths than having one more mediocre restaurant in it
Contrary to what you may believe, the market has failure modes. Just because something is difficult to monetise doesn't mean that it's not valuable. Fundamental research is one such thing. It can open up vast realms of possibility for all of humanity, but in a way that's difficult, if not impossible, to privatise. And the benefits may take years, decades or even centuries to pay off. Thus there is very little incentive for any market actors to invest in them.
But if Newton had decided to open an inn instead of work on the Principia the world would have been far worse off for it. Possibly centuries behind where we are now.
I will apologise for calling the restaurant mediocre. I have no idea about the quality of the food, but if you think that's what this hinges on then you've missed the point. That as good a restaurant as it may be, it's not worth losing a mathematician of his calibre over.
I get it, but I do get some satisfaction out of observing when justifications of perceived value meet market realities. I don't think it's bad, I think it's interesting, and the person made the choice that was theirs to make. That's economic freedom.
I'm not sure what you're deriving satisfaction out of. That the market prevented someone from being able to earn a living and fulfilling their potential at the same time? I'm genuinely confused
I don't believe there's enough data in the original comment to assume that the market prevented them from being able to fulfill their living working with physics. It said they could make more money running a restaurant. If that it is the case they could not earn a living at all, and it's due to discrimination, which I asked about, then I agree it's not good. But if it's the case they could make a living in physics but chose to instead open a restaurant due to making a better living that way, then yes I think it's good.
Based on the provided information I judge it more likely that their passion was maths and physics but were prevented from doing so because of certain economic realities than they had more interest in running a restaurant than engaging in research. You may disagree.
Eastern Europeans can relate too. Lots of people with phd from finance to physics and philosophy were or at least started like that in Western Europe too.
In Kentucky, he became involved with a group interested in Chinese democracy. Its slogan was “Freedom, Democracy, Rule of Law, and Pluralism.” A member of the group, a chemist in a lab, opened a Subway franchise as a means of raising money. “Since Tom was a genius at numbers,” another member of the group told me, “he was invited to help him.” Zhang kept the books.
But why is streaming rental for 24 hours? Why can't we do rentals for two weeks for videos? Is there a good reason to make it so difficult to stream? I don't want to watch it a million times. I just want to make it through once, but it takes me several sittings typically to finish a movie.
Good luck finding a movie about Isaac Newton or Einstein, or literally anyone whose value to the world is more than pretending to be someone else or lying a lot, let alone a very interesting mathematician no one recognizes. (Ok I know there’s a few movies about folks like Turing and Nash, but it’s pretty slim pickings).
Einstein is probably a terrible example here because in his day he was regarded as a pop culture icon so there’s plenty about him in film [1]. That’s not even considering that he’s had plenty of excellent biographies written about him. Agora with Rachel Weisz is an excellent one about Hypatia.
Could we do better as a society? Maybe. To do that though you’d have to bring these stories into film classrooms and get students inspired. But first you have to make the stories inspiring and a lot of them aren’t thaaat much except for the advancements they provided to the field and that’s harder to convey. Maybe Leibniz and Newton would be a good rivalry on the screen.
My point is even einstein doesn’t get the same treatment as, say, a politician or actor gets as far as coverage. There’s more out there about Elvis than Newton.
This whole theme is sort incompatible with movies. Most people like to relate to the characters in the plot. The "genius guy" does something we can't understand has very little appeal as a story.
Same thing goes for mathematics that is too "deep". Most people could not care less about prime numbers. Yes, they drive important cryptographic procedures. But we care about cryptography. We care that the message gets to its destination "safely". If its done using prime numbers, imaginary numbers, geometric numbers or fantasy numbers, it does not matter.
See I disagree. They tend to live very interesting lives, not because of their achievement, but I suspect their achievements and how interesting their life is is inextricably intertwined. They tend to not fit in convention very well and live at odds with society in a not too dissimilar way to say a Bob Dylan or Jim Morrison, but without the music and poetry. You’re right of course that folks like to watch movies about people they are aware of and understand their contribution. But I’d also point out that society overall is a lot better educated than in the past, more people than ever would find scientists and mathematicians and engineers easier to identify with and would understand their contribution than ever before - and those people also control an incredible amount of the available disposable income.
I think the real issue is the producers and directors and business folks in the film industry are not in that camp. They’re more likely to make a biography of Robin Williams than Paul Dirac, and they decide what gets made.
There have been many, many films made about Srinivasa Ramanujan. I'd particularly recommend the 2015 one, The Man Who Knew Infinity, I found it super charming.
There's an excellent series in which Newton plays a large part, called The Baroque Cycle. I'd love a TV adaptation of it, although you'd have to gut much of academic stuff in it and just focus on the (excellent) plot
I've seen a few biopics or dramatizations of famous people - notably, The Imitation Game about Alan Turing which was all right, and the Theory of Everything which supposedly was about Stephen Hawking's work but it was more about his relationships - it was based on the memoirs of his ex-wife. But both were dramatizations from secondhand information at best; a biopic of older people like Einstein will be even more picky.
I mean would a biopic about Einstein touch on his many relationships (including his cousin) and the drama around that?
Also, biopics are terrible. I can't think of a single one that is worth it, especially if you consider that for many of the subjects, you could just watch a documentary on the person anyway, often with real footage and interviews with them. Biopics are usually just cash grabs and weird Hollywood flexes about mimicking someone else. The fact that they do so well at the awards ceremonies speaks to this.
I find them useful for teaching my 8 year old something about the person behind the name. After watching Einstein and Eddingiton (pretty ok movie) she has a better appreciation for who he is beyond a name. Obviously you learn almost nothing about his research and it’s a very tiny slice of Einsteins extraordinarily interesting life.
I am updating my assumptions about Subway Sandwich Artists. When they seem unfocused on the artwork at hand it may be because they are thinking more important thoughts.
> Prior to getting back to academia, he worked for several years as an accountant and a delivery worker for a New York City restaurant. He also worked in a motel in Kentucky and in a Subway sandwich shop. A profile published in the Quanta Magazine reports that Zhang used to live in his car during the initial job-hunting days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang