Posts tagged as:

math

Great Quote from John Stallings

January 19, 2009

I was reading the obituary of John Stallings, a mathematician at UC Berkeley who is famous for his contributions to proving the Poincare Conjecture, when I came across the following quote:
I was unable to find flaws in my ‘proof’ for quite a while, even though the error is very obvious. It was a psychological problem, [...]

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Why Aren’t There More Prizes in Science?

August 14, 2008

photo credit: incarnate
Newt Gingrich recently wrote an editorial in the WSJ [subscription required] calling for greater use of prizes to solve the world’s problems. Regardless of what you think about Newt’s politics, it’s difficult to deny that the current grants-based process of funding science isn’t meeting our needs. Grants are too risk-averse and too [...]

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