i have a feeling that there will be some sort of youth movement, in the next couple of years. the kids these days, cant be comprehended by college teachers. ow college teachers , trix is for kids.
Why do you say that?
I don’t think so. At least, not in the objective majors. There’s a reason why wisdom comes with age in these disciplines - It takes a looong time to learn all this stuff.
I’m still somewhat in awe of the amount of specialized knowledge in just one corner of one floor of our engineering library - disciplines other than my own specialty and so many of them that I couldn’t master even 1% of it if I read and applied for the rest of my life - and that’s assuming that the knowledge in these fields remained static and the amount of material wasn’t increasing.
To climb to the summit of knowing how to actually design something in engineering, or to actually advance the frontiers of physics, you have to put in years and years of hard effort in mathematics and science. Genius wears off around sophmore year. Certain people can master the math faster, and have far better visualization skills, but it’s still a lot of skills to learn that there’s no skipping around no matter how many novel thought-tricks you can bring to bear. Even Einstein had to call in fellow mathematicians to help him with general relativity.
we pretended to be smarter then the library. but thats the way it went. inertia is just a word.
You’re quite the non-sequitur aren’t you GH.
Objective? What, praytell, is objective about engineering that isn’t as objective about (I’m assuming here) sociology or history?
Given that these kids are illiterate, lazy, ignorant, selfish, egocentric, materialistic, conformist, individualistic, lack critical thinking or any particular imaginative abilities I wouldn’t expect that any movement from them will be worth writing home about, if you see what I mean.
Sometime in this last week I say an article on the Channel 4 news (the best TV news in the country, but still inadequate at times) abotu whether 16 year olds should have the vote. So they got five 16 year olds from some London school on the show, three white kids (2 male, 1 female, dressed differently) and a fat black girl and a skinny middle Asian lad (probably of Indian or Pakistani descent). You know, a real cross-section of society. They proceeded to ask them about whether or not they felt that they should get the vote. The only reason given by any of the kids that was actually intelligible was that he 'might leave school and get a job and pay taxes, therefore he should be able to vote) as though being an idiotic wage slave was somehow a democratic right…
All the other reasons given were either so logically and grammatically tortured (and of course laden with cliche and easy of use phrases that only further ambiguate everything) to make them incomprehendable or spurious, such as, “I can drive a car and have sex, why can’t I vote?” as though being able to drive a car (badly) and have sex (badly) were some sort of qualification…
Personally I think that unless someone can actually produce an argument ‘policy X is better than policy Y because of reasons A, B and C’ then they shouldn’t be able to vote, no matter what their age…
I expect very, very little from this generation of youngsters, even less than I expect of my own…
Hey! we’re not all that bad… well maybe in the UK but here… well 
maybe your right…
Maybe the kids know they don’t have shit to look forward to. So they are trying to find solutions to problems. Us old people don’t care anymore about giving them a bright future to look forward to, we are too wrapped up in ourselves. (and making money)
Not everyone, no… Just most of them, and a movement en masse would involve most of them…
Doesn’t any one still believe that you peek earliest in Mathematics. 21 or something like that. Not much later for Physics and so forth? Lots of evidence for it in Math.
Ed3,
As a 20 year old mathematician I find this somewhat shocking. What’s the evidence?
whew, i’m comforted, here’s an article setting the bar a little higher. I’m not to be put out to pasture just yet!
Hi aporia
Good article. I think that 21 was a little young. I guess that I think of Galois, Newton, and Gauss when I am thinking about Mathematicians. Gauss did do some good work when he was older, but even by his own accord the work was in his thoughts when he was young.
I did not realize that you were as young as you are. Good luck in your studies.
What are you interested in? - Have you done Galois Theory?
I think the Greenhouse effect is having an unfavorable effect on the youth movement.
I also think that most of what was accomplished by genius in the realms of art, music, literature and philosophy is doomed to become extinct along with so many other life forms that we KNOW are destined to eradication.
…but that’s OK as long as we keep on growing the size and resolution of our plasma screens to give sports and the Oscars that ‘virtual reality’ effect!
Ed3, thanks! I think I’ll need all the luck I can get for the PhD program I’ll be entering this year. I’ll be seeing some Galois theory this semester in an abstract algebra course. Abstract algebra is pretty interesting but I think I will do something more applied in grad school. I’m interested in applications of math to economics, computer science, artificial intelligence, physics (physics is my other undergraduate major), lots of stuff. Pretty much anything mathematical will excite me, but especially if I can see it has some real-world power to help people. Up here at the U of M they are having seminars about the mathematics of imaging. Those have been really interesting. So might do that too.
I’m kind of disturbed by these long-term problems that we seem to be content to ignore. I know there’s some dispute about global warming but this is our planet we’re talking about, we shouldn’t take chances. And the US national debt, social security obligations, the health care system… big changes are just beyond our horizon and not enough people care. That’s the one thing that makes me feel ambivalent about going into math; I wonder if I should be out there networking with people, trying to figure out how to solve these problems and get the social power to implement the solutions.
But I’m not nearly as good with people as I am with math, and I figure I should go with what I love doing rather than what I think I should be doing. So hopefully it will work out…
Its true, my generation is a giant army of trendy drones. There is a youth movement, and its going on today. They’re all going to the mall, once they find a ride.
Let me count the ways I hate most of my peers. Oh, I give up. I cannot count that high.
The youth of today is not like the youth of my parent’s generation. But, yeah, why do you say that?