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poorasian
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Anyone have stories of being successful with an undergrad GPA of around 3.3? I got off to a really bad start, started making some progress, and fell back down again this quarter.
mathwonk said:I hope you know I am not to blame for the new lame name for this thread. The brilliantly witty tag "Who wants to be a mathematician?" has been changed without my consultation. Has tolerance of a sense of humor departed this realm?
mathwonk said:Better work takes longer of course, but unfortunately the frequency of publications is often influenced greatly by the deadline for renewing your grant or for promotion. I.e. people are forced to publish works in time for those events to occur. Since most grants are for 3 years or less, it is very hard, if not impossible to work on a project taking longer than that, except for very well established or secure people.
In some departments it is expected to publish at least one paper a year, and in some areas many more than that is usual.
My first project took about 5 years, but i was young and naive and even so was having to fend off people telling me that I was not publishing fast enough. Everyone I know who has done a big 5 year project has had the same problems.
Ideally one wants to complete some significant piece of work before publishing it, but there may be a race with someone else working on a similar project to be first. If on waits too long priority may be lost. Ideally one does not care about this and just tries to do the best science possible, but the support for pure science is not so great. A good journal will often reject a paper that has only partial results on a given problem, even decent partial results.
Sometimes the people receiving the most recognition in the form of promotions, grants, etc, are publishing large numbers of minor works. There are department chairmen who evaluate their personnel merely by counting the number of papers published. But this is perhaps within a restricted setting. Worldwide, top recognition usually follows the best work.One should try not to be guided too much by these mundane considerations, insofar as one can avoid it, but you have to pay your bills, in order to be able to work.
reenmachine said:Suppose you are working on something very hard , something that will probably require 5+ years to complete or at least advanced to a significant degree , do you still have the time to work a something more trivial that you can publish just in order to satisfy people that are pressuring you to publish?Mostly uninteresting work but just good enough to publish it.
About publishing , suppose you're in some decent math department , how do the publishing process works exactly? Does being published = who you know/who knows you or is it guaranteed you are going to get published if you have a job in a math department? If your work doesn't get published where is your work going?
mathwonk said:it is smart to have several smaller works to publish while working on a bigger one, but it takes a bit of savvy to manage that.
mathwonk said:here is my summary vita.
dkotschessaa said:Or is there another book that might give me a good crash course? Or should I just get the textbook itself?
mathwonk said:absolutely! hear hear! what else could possibly be learned here? popularity is its own curse. If we let this thread go to a million views it may never die!
But on the general principle that it is better to actually answer a question than to make smart alecky remarks, I recommend the OP go to my web page where there are several free algebra books posted for download.
http://www.math.uga.edu/~roy/
by all means read as much as possible. you can only do so much but whatever you do helps.
mathwonk said:But on the general principle that it is better to actually answer a question than to make smart alecky remarks, I recommend the OP go to my web page where there are several free algebra books posted for download.
Sankaku said:I am sorry you saw it as a "smart alecky remark." It was intended as useful advice. Asking for textbook information in a textbook forum seems like a logical step, no?
shezi1995 said:Are the proofs we do in the olympiads(like IMO) upto the level required for maths study at university level? I have been studying stuff, in the training camps for the olympiad, that goes way beyond my school curriculum like classical inequalities(cauchy shwartz, chebychev), functional equations, number theory, proof based euclidian geometry and combinatorics. So how beneficial is this study with regards to a preparation for a career in mathematics? The level of problems in this olympiad math is quite high compared to the normal school curriculum.
Secondly, does undergraduate education play a big role in your future math education leading to research? Does one need to study in really good universities to get good undergrad education?
mathwonk said:its all about how good people think you are. presumably some of your teachers have an opinion about this. letters on your degree are less important except to admissions committees who know no math.