Comment by Onavo

5 days ago

> Lysing action of the (1,2)b-carotene receptive encephalopathy pathway

High school biology is enough to get a vague idea of this though.

Right. With a college degree, I understand most of these words. I don’t have a clue about the impact of the research or how it fits into the corpus, but I understand the gist of the article title.

Despite my degree being in engineering, which involved 4 semesters of calculus, and 3 other semesters of math, (7 total) I have absolutely no fucking clue what’s going on in the Fields Medal description above. It’s only barely more intelligible than if it had been written in Chinese (which I truly cannot read at all).

I genuinely don’t understand it at all. Even words that I think I recognize like “harmonic” or “geometric” are useless to me because the actual terms are “harmonic analysis” and “geometric measure theory” and I have 0% clue what those are.

I don’t have to google any of the words in the example biology title.

  • Did your 7 semesters of calculus include any courses that a math major would take?

    For example, a single upper-division undergrad level course on probability will expose you to measure theory.

    Similarly, harmonic analysis is something that you can take as a reasonably good senior in mathematics.

    • I think most undergrad level course on probability expose you to measure theory _without_ telling you they are measure theory.

    • I took multivariate calculus (I to III), differential equations, statistics, discrete math, and linear algebra.

      I didn't take those courses you're talking about, but that's my point. I have a top <1% education in math in the nation, maybe top 2-3% of all college grads, and that's not enough to even scratch the surface of the summary.

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