2Pi

Quote: Original post by SticksandStones
I don't like the idea of 10 = PhD. Namely because at that level your mathematics skills are going to be in a very narrowly focused field, such as Commutative Rings, Fluid Dynamics, Generating Functions, etc. Being a skilled algebraist does not make one necessarily inclined to be a skilled analyst or statistician. Certain people have specific areas that they excel in. Myself, am quite fond of Analysis whereas a fellow student is better at the abstract fields of mathematics.

That being said, I would probably rate myself an 8.


EDIT:

I just noticed Trapper Zoid held a similar opinion to mine. Also being a student of mathematics, I'm inclined to think that maybe (perhaps) those outside the field seem to think that upper level mathematics is simply filled with courses like the introductory Calculus courses taught to most engineering and science students. Much like those outside the realm of chemistry may confuse Chemistry with the act of mixing an acid and base to produce a salt and water. The field of mathematics is simply stunningly huge. How much mathematics there is to learn is enough to overwhelm anyone. The topic of Combinatorics (which every computer scientist is probably intimate with) goes well beyond just finding solutions to counting problems. Some interesting problems in combinatorics end up being related to Group theory (which is in a whole other class of mathematics itself). Group Theory leads to Ring Theory, which shows up occasionally in analysis. So, while any mathematician will have a basic understanding of these topics they will rarely have great understanding of all of them.

These are good points. Poincare is often called the last universalist. However, there are an exceptional few mathematicians who do seem to have an all-around, universal understanding of mathematics. As I mentioned earlier, the first person to come to mind with regard to this is Terence Tao, who started in harmonic analysis, then moved to number theory (achieving a significant result by using not the previous work of number theorists but measure theory and Szemeredi's theorem), and now he has expanded to combinatorics, linear algebra (recovering matrices of low rank knowing only some of their elements), and amazingly even some algebraic geometry.

I guess the question is whether we should include people like this in the scale.

Quote: Original post by Promit
Error: cannot use constant literal as an l-value.

Oh. Shit.

For every day math I'd rate myself as a 9. Comfortable with trig/geo/linear math.

On the proposed scale of Stephan Hawking as 10 I'll take a 3. Assuming there are other things at work in the rating.

Solve this and you're a 10 in my book:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodge_conjecture

If you understand half of it, you're an 8. :-)

I teach mathematics in high school. I would not rate myself any higher than 3. And I really don't need to be half as good as I am to do my job well.

Quote: Original post by ToohrVyk

Ah, brings back memories of Futurama.
Any tv show that makes use of aleph_{0}plex in it was not destined to last very long:(
In the episode Raging Bender of the television show Futurama, the movie theater the characters visit is named the \aleph_{0}plex.