Ted, what in your opinion accounts for this trend? Are people dumber per se, or there 's some real reason? In other words, does education dumb down and yields dumber students, or have students become less brilliant, hence lower standards?
No, we have in the US parents who have raised their kids to be entitled and the parents complain if they don't get the highest grades. The last ten years we've had parents calling and showing up to run their children's lives.
I think the best students are fine. But we've lowered standards and lowered expectations overall.
@JasperLoy No, but when you wrote 'I am planning to move to your country some day' i read 'I am planning to move your country some day' and that made me laught :D
Wikipedia: Jeff Atwood is an American software developer, author, blogger, and entrepreneur. He is known for the programming blog Coding Horror, and as the co-founder of the question-and-answer website Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network
Yes, @David, but I'm biased. ... GA Tech is higher-ranked than we are. I am proud of the stuff I've developed for our best undergrads, but I'm about to be gone :D
Hmmm, probably Tech. We have two very strong analysts who do harmonic analysis/combinatorial number theory. But Tech has more (applied) analysis for sure.
@Jasper Loy, UCLA seems a bit out of my reach at the moment... I've sort of gotten attached to my girlfriend's kids here in Georgia, and I doubt much would tear me away from them at this point.
@TedShifrin, thanks for the info... Um, I hope it's ok that I'm asking so many questions, but do you know of any resources or help for an old guy that wants to go back to school? Any time I search for scholarships and such they're always geared towards young people, and I honestly can't imagine any young person that would be as hardcore of a student as I would be. ;)
@JasperLoy, oh I have no idea.. Also, I'd probably want to start out as a Junior (or equivalent) since I've developed a lot of bad habits over the years and I need a good dose of theory to set me straight.
@DavidKirby Hmm, I don't know if there are grad programs that allow you to do that, but hey you can always do your own studying and everything. After all you need the GRE to get into grad school
@Ted I want to determine the 3-fold covers of the punctured torus. This is equivalent to finding the 3-fold covers of $S^1 \vee S^1$. But I've no clue how to approach this.
@David, I don't think we're ageist in terms of support. It's based on quality. But commuting from Marietta/ATL is pretty much impossible for a grad student.
"2 vectors so we should add them together using Σ. 3 components so we need to times them using Π. And the 3 goes over the Σ and the 2 goes over the Π. ?? "
Up to homeomorphism I only see two connected 2-fold covers, @Ted: take a pair of circles and glue their north and south poles together, and a chain of three circles.
There's a clever argument, @mirgee, due supposedly to Fermat, where one uses a geometric subdivision of the interval, rather than an arithmetic subdivision. That is, divide into subintervals whose lengths form a geometric sequence.
But the algebra is quite nontrivial. I actually put this into Spivak's Calculus as an exercise.
Then the upper and lower sums turn out to be a geometric series, and so you can do it without any ridiculous formulas.
$\lim_{n\to \infty}\sum_{i=1}^n(a(\frac{b}{a})^{1\over n})^pa({{b}\over{a}})^{\frac{i}{n}}(1-(\frac{b}{a})^{-\frac{1}{n}}) $ for any masochist out there :)
if you're talking to people in chat and ask for help with something that coincides with the site that's fine, but don't make your only participation thirsty one-line pleas to advertise a question
