James Freitag

Professor of Math at UIC.

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@NorthS2021 @joelwatsonfish @victorckumar the bit about being a famous researcher is the operative thing in such cases

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@Quasilocal It is (or was) like most things in the US, more capitalistic. It wasn’t all that good for that many people (success rate was usually less than 1/6).

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@QiaochuYuan He also had access to the result before the general public.

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@littmath @Jabaluck At a given level of skill, I think fuzzy skills can matter a lot. When you get a lot better, I think substitution effects make these kind of skills (at the previous level) mostly not matter). Is this your sense?

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@littmath @yacineMTB Even if it cost a lot, like say 100K, most people should realize that typical mathematicians writing papers on this level (in the US) make more than 100K annually, and none of us get a result this good every year.

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@littmath @scheminglunatic But every algebraic geometer or model theorist I knew just sort of shrugged and felt rather certain all such uses were a matter of convenience (like eg various saturation or nonstandard model arguments).

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@littmath @scheminglunatic There were some articles and talks on this maybe a decade ago by some philosopher (given at model theory adjacent events). I remember thinking the talks or at least how some discussed them were portraying the situation as slightly uncertain…

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@RadishHarmers Like what if there had instead been some Grothendieck-like figure writing about about walnuts and model theory?

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@RadishHarmers It seems like there really could be some alternate timeline in which people get worked up about an entirely different collection of mathematical topics.

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@LocasaleLab By middle management, I'd guess you mean associate dean level folks, right?

Or do you mean something more like the dean of the school of engineering, for instance?

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@SebastienBubeck @lmthang @tonylfeng I don’t think it is quite yet the norm. Anecdotally, I think a rather small (but growing) minority of papers use AI in some significant way. Certainly it is now common enough that it isn’t surprising.

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

[Hayashi Heikichi @lianda_edu]

To be frank, I used to think that doing AI research required learning a lot of advanced mathematics. But then several AI and computer science PhDs told me that they actually don’t need to study things like real analysis, convex optimization, dynamic programming, or many of the other mathematical topics that economists are so proud of knowing. In most cases, they either never use them at all, or they simply learn what they need on the spot when a research problem requires it.

[NimwegenLab @NimwegenLab]

This is such corrosive shit to say.
And it's simply not true. Yes, the higher up the ladder one goes, the more politics gets involved. But faculty hiring and tenure decisions, in my experience, are still largely based on a committee of peers trying to decide on academic merit.

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@AlexKontorovich For Latex documents prepared in my math classes, it has taken very little effort to just change a couple lines to produce documents which can be exported to a compliant format. Let me know if you want details (you department probably also already has such a solution).

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@Isthis2023 @thomasfbloom @GlitchGazer20 There is very little prestige associated with most Erdos problems, and very little attention on them.

In many cases Erdos problems were solved without them being known as an Erdos problem.

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@Handre If getting such a position was not worth it to many of us, we wouldn't go to the trouble.

Most graduate students I speak with (in my field) are well-aware of the job market situation. The stipend is enough to live on, grad school is fun, and the PhD opens a lot of doors.

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@alz_zyd_ Some games are more fun to play on the hard setting...

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@joelwatsonfish I can’t quite recall every year, but similar budgets were proposed during Trump’s first term as well, right?

[James Freitag @jimfreitag]

@AliceFromQueens @feelsdesperate Certainly, things are not functioning normally at NSF and NIH. Beyond budgets, many on the ground anecdotes confirm this.

In my program area, no standard grants have been awarded this year. Normally the first grants awarded would have been awarded several months ago.