![]() My reply is always that I don’t expect any calls so I don’t switch on my mobile Anecdote: See my second paragraph above and #12 in Tao’s list for Anecdote’s I think your business is awesome, but Tao doesn’t operate under the same business model. It’s a monster, this fame game, which is why other top mathematicians like Perelman or Grothendieck decide to withdraw My brother complains about the exact same thing. And when mathematicians start getting famous, some people think that’s a good time to send them new (and improved!) proofs of every conjecture known under the sun. His pseudo-accessibility is partly due to the public availability of his email address anyway, being in academia and a big user of the arXiv. Some of the email types he listed are emails that he may reply to, but his replies may be severely restricted due to his heavy commitments. You need to be more specific, though (if you may allow a mathematician to guide you…:) ). ReplyĬal: Good article that hammers in the point of the perils of being too plugged in. I think ignoring people only seems rude until you realise that the need for it is just a function of the scale and interconnectedness of our society. ![]() Since the fan-in on the network is so high, the vast majority of all communication should be ignored, so ignorability needs to be built into the communication medium. The main benefit of text over audio, is it’s easier to filter and ignore people over email. I suspect telephones will just be replaced with portable text messaging/e-mail devices in a few years, with only audio for emergency purposes. The device I’d really like to see go away is the telephone. I have several gigabytes of email in my inbox, which I’ve read some tiny fraction of. ![]() I just have filters to for spam, mailing list traffic, or anything that has low signal to noise ratio. I think that being able to focus in our society means getting good at ignoring things as much as anything.Į-mail is the best way to get a hold of me as well, but I also filter 99.9% of correspondence. I’m not sure what such a future would look like, but I can only hope that it doesn’t include contact policies so complex that only a mathematician can fully understand them. I like to ponder what the middle ground might look like - a philosophy of work where communication technology is isolated and tuned to specific circumstances where it provides unambiguous benefit, and ruthlessly culled elsewhere. The scenario that intrigues me is not to move to an opposite extreme and promote a world of techno-Luddism. Instead of deploying tools like e-mail to maximize our effectiveness, we grant them default positions in our lives protected by an impossibly high threshold for disuse - a threshold usually articulated as: “If there is any possible negative consequence of abandoning full-throttled use of this technology, I won’t.” I don’t know the specific reasons for Tao’s pseudo-accessibility, but his story emphasizes a general trend I first identified in my essay on quitting Facebook: our society has a warped relationship with communication technology. Dedicating hours to interview requests and career advice seems somehow wasteful.īut this motivates an intriguing question: why have a public e-mail address at all? Certainly it would be simpler for him to omit any contact information from his web page. The world’s top math mind is most valuable to society when it’s solving our knottiest combinatorial quandaries. In other words, Terry Tao doesn’t want to hear from you. It then goes on to list 22 different types of e-mails that he will not respond to - a list that includes invitations to “collaborate,” “contribute data to a project,” “give talk,” or “attend seminars or conferences.” He also declines requests for “career advice” and “copies of his work.” On a separate page, he notes that he’s “not giving interviews at this time,” and diverts all other queries to a representative of the UCLA office of media relations. The best way to contact me is via e-mail. Here’s what interests me about Tao: on his well-trafficked web site, he has a contact page that starts… Next, less than a month after his return from the Fields ceremony, Tao learned that he won a $500,000 MacArthur “Genius Grant” - leading the LA Times to dub him a “Mozart of Math.” (One of Tao’s fellow prizewinners in 2006 was Grigori Perelman, the eccentric Russian who roared to international celebrity by solving the long-standing Poincaré conjecture.) First, in August of that year, he received the Fields Medal, an elite prize, given only once every four years, that honors the world’s top mathematicians. ![]() The late summer of 2006 was a heady time for Terry Tao. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |