Mathochist! Get over yourself.

The BBQ Pit
1

From this thread :

What’s the harshest part? The stale donuts in the seminar room? Getting the pencil lead off your fingers? Perhaps it’s the long, grueling walk from the library to your office.

Obviously this only afflicts pure mathematicians.

Is it the amount you “could be making”, or the amount you feel you should be making that bothers you? Because if it’s the latter, no salary could possibly satisfy your titanic ego.

So it is possible to be paranoid and snobbish at the same time! In reality, you love it when people say things like this. You practically begged for it in the linked thread when you defined a tensor in the language of category theory. Did you momentarily think you were in the Pure Mathematics Seminar at Stanford? No, you knew damn well that practically nobody was going to understand what a category, a bifunctor, a natural transformation, a composite trifunctor, or a bimodule was, and you conspicuously omitted definitions of these terms, thus contributing little information but much self-aggrandizement to the thread.

You don’t want the answer to that.

You need some perspective. You, as a graduate student, are being paid to sit in a comfortable chair and think. 100 percent minus epsilon of the rest of humanity, while they may not possess your ineffable genius, must do things that others deem useful in order to earn a living. I mean no disrespect to the endeavor of mathematics - it is truly the queen of the sciences - but really, you are in a position that cannot by any measure be called harsh.

Face it, you chose the name Mathochist because you want to promote the idea that mathematics is punishing, thus bringing acclaim to yourself and your peers because of your superior, almost godlike ability to sustain such abuse. If the government voted a million-dollar yearly stipend for all mathematicians, to be awarded on national television before an adoring public, you would regard it as no less than your due.

Mathematics can be simple, direct and fun. You turn it into a masturbatory, ego-feeding buzz saw to be inflicted on people. I cannot think of a notion more harmful to the fight against ignorance.

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There’s a bit of ego there, but people do seem to get a lot out of his posts, and everything he posted in that thread was a response to a question. Sorry, but it’s a weak pitting.

3

Yet no one ever seems to complain about the artists sob stories. “Oh I have sufferd for my art”

Still I think we might need a TMM label on threads with too much math in them.

4

Also add
TMA Too much art
TMH Too much history
TMR Too much religion
TMP Too many puns

5

That thread made my head asplode.

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I’m thirty two. After 14 years of not setting foot in a math class I’m taking a trig course at the local community college because I have a practical need for the knowledge. Unlike much of the class who are mostly fresh out of high school, I’m finding it to be a breeze so far. I’m feeling pretty good about myself math-wise right now.

I’m with World Eater. That thread made my head asplode.

7

Cut the guy/gal some slack. S/he’s getting paid – what? Quarter- or half-time payment as a TA? Compared to what an engineering or CS grad could earn straight out of the box with a bachelor’s degree? Yeah, I’d say the grad student gets a lot less.

And it is an all-consuming endeavor. I can see where it can also be physically punishing, as you wouldn’t have time to do all the “right” things for your body, like preparing healthful meals and working out.

If nothing else, you should set the record straight and tell us whether you are also a mathemetician–only then are you qualified to comment. I’m not, myself, so I’m not able to.

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Absolutely! The noumenon is a harsh mistress.

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Ahh, poor Hyperelastic, somebody thinks they are smarter than you and you resent that. Poor, poor Hypereleastic, have a cookie.

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A martyr complex is a martyr complex, be it coming from a janitor or a philosopher. But personally, I think that post was more than a little tongue-in-cheek.

11

ultrafilter’s sig makes my head asplode.

12

Give him a break, willya? Slide-rule oil fumes make him feel supremely confident, but then they wear off and leave him shivering in the corner, too weak to even to carry a one.

13

Eh. Mathematicians are a self-righteous lot, but more power to 'em. I’m a third-year Comp Sci student; I’ve got a few years of standard Calculus under my belt, as well as Vector Geometry and Vector Calculus, and a couple Logic courses I took for shits and giggles (I figured it’d help with Debate as much as with Comp Sci). I grokked the basic concepts of what was going on in the referenced thread, but far from enough to comment on anything specific.

That said, Mathochist may come off as arrogant, but he knows what he’s talking about, so I say leave him to it. Martyrdom complex or not, if you want an answer in regard to higher mathematics, he’s got it. All subtexts can and should be ignored, as they’ll provide little in the way of clarification anyhow.

Not to sound arrogant myself, but I often take the same tack as Mathochist took in that thread when asked about a topic that requires intensive study to make heads or tails of it: give 'em the full-blown explanation, no subtitles, footnotes or parentheticals. Ask a high-level question, get a high-level answer, and if you don’t understand, that’s not my problem. This is not intended to imply that I’m smarter than the person asking…for example, my former debate coach, whose intellect I respect more than any other person I know, once asked me a question about the intricacies of how I translated a sentence in his native Japanese (which I speak bits and pieces of; thank you, anime) to French (which I speak and write with some skill). As he had never studied a romance language (English was his mother’s language; he had no formal training), my answer was clearly meaningless to him. Instead of getting insulted, however, he simply understood that the problem lay in the fact that he’d asked a question in a subject he didn’t know anything about, and went on with his life. Had I asked him a similar question about, for example, tensors, I would have been even more perplexed by his response.

So, in conclusion: Mathochist may be arrogant when it comes to his pet subject, but then, he has every right to be so. When he asks you a question about your area of expertise, you can be just as arrogant right back at him. I’m sure he’ll understand.

Note: the above post assumes that Mathochist is male. In the event this assumption is false, please mentally substitute the appropriate gender pronouns in the above text. Thank you.

14

Roland,

People ask questions to get answers. If the answer makes no sense, how does that help anyone? Your example about your debate coach doesn’t make for much of an argument at all considering that you did absolutely nothing to help your coach. Maybe he got on in life, but maybe he also muttered, “what a prick,” along the way.

I’m baffled. Wait, wait, don’t try to help…

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Well, yah. But if the person asked a sophisticated enough question for Mathochist to answer in a technical way, then I assume he was just trying to be respectful to the person asking the question.

It would be like me asking “How do I prevent my Creme Caramel from getting that eggy layer around the edge?” and having someone answer “First, you get a pot. Then you turn on the stove. Then you pick up a spoon…”

Do you see where I’m coming from here? If a person asks a question with a certain amount of skill it’s only fair to respond as if they have a requisit level of knowledge in order to ask the question in the first place. Shit - I read the title of that OP and thought they were talking about tensor bandages - clearly I wasn’t the target audience, and I think it would be a pretty sad state of affairs if an expert in the field answered the question as though I was.

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No, actually, he didn’t. What he did do was realize that there was no way for me to answer his question meaningfully without first giving him a comprehensive lesson in the finer points of French grammar, usage, and vocabulary. The sentence used the subjunctive, which he was entirely unfamiliar with, and the unique (to my admittely limited linguistic knowledge) French adverb-adjective-noun construction. Explaining that to him would’ve taken longer than it was worth for either one of us. For what it’s worth, I’ve asked him any number of questions regarding odd aspects of Japanese, and his responses have made zero sense to me, just as I figured they would. I’ve had no formal training in Japanese, and thus no context in which to be able to interpret his explanation. Same deal.

In other words, if you don’t know anything about calculus, don’t be surprised when you ask what “integrating a vector function” is and the person can’t make the response meaningful to you. Whether or not the person you asked is high-handed in this behavior is pretty much irrelevant if you lack the context to understand it anyhow. Again, it doesn’t mean anybody’s smarter than anybody, just that certain topics require a background in them to discuss any specific points.

On preview: this is strongly related to alice_in_wonderland’s response. As I said in my previous post, ask a high-level question, get a high-level answer. Don’t get offended that the basics aren’t explained to you beforehand…the person probably expected that you’d be aware of the context of your question, or you wouldn’t have asked it.

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I’m just glad that, since my head asploded, I’m not the one who has to clean it up.

I’m no dummy, but all the math left me huddled shaking in a corner.

18

Um, what’s 9 x 10 equal?

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I looked through the thread you referenced, Hyperelastic, and I can’t see what’s got you so upset about Mathochist. If I ask somebody a complex question, I expect a complex answer. I’ve listened to athletes grouse about what hard work their sport is, and I’ve listened to geeks do the same. They’re both right, but (for the most part), they’re doing something they love doing, and that makes it worthwhile.

As long as Mathochist isn’t saying, “I’m better than you because I understand math,” I have no problem with the posts. We all have our areas of expertise, and the beauty of these boards is that, whatever you’re wondering, someone here probably knows the answer.

If you’re reading the thread, Mathochist, I’ll add my vote for continuing to answer questions fully. It’s a great contribution to the boards.