Posted on 05/22/2020 2:44:42 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
It took Lisa Piccirillo less than a week to answer a long-standing question about a strange knot discovered over half a century ago by the legendary John Conway.
In the summer of 2018, at a conference on low-dimensional topology and geometry, Lisa Piccirillo heard about a nice little math problem. It seemed like a good testing ground for some techniques she had been developing as a graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin.
“I didn’t allow myself to work on it during the day,” she said, “because I didn’t consider it to be real math. I thought it was, like, my homework.”
Before the week was out, Piccirillo had an answer: The Conway knot is not “slice.” A few days later, she met with Cameron Gordon, a professor at UT Austin, and casually mentioned her solution.
“I said, ‘What?? That’s going to the Annals right now!’” Gordon said, referring to Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline’s top journals.
“He started yelling, ‘Why aren’t you more excited?’” said Piccirillo, now a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University. “He sort of freaked out.”
“I don’t think she’d recognized what an old and famous problem this was,” Gordon said.
Piccirillo’s proof appeared in Annals of Mathematics in February. The paper, combined with her other work, has secured her a tenure-track job offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that will begin on July 1, only 14 months after she finished her doctorate.
(Excerpt) Read more at quantamagazine.org ...
I prefer what Ernest Rutherford said,
“If you can’t explain your physics to a barmaid it is probably not very good physics.”
He must have hung a lot at the local pub!
No day job left bro so comedy is my specialty........
–that 10,000 hours of practice can turn anyone into an expert–probably isn’t true, a new study says...
Perhaps you could collect deposit bottles/cans and run them to the high paying states?
I haven’t noticed any on FR but many other sites have many offers of high paying jobs, no work required!
Just a few clicks away.
That happened to me as well . I got 2d=60(d/30 +t2) Where t2 is the time of the return and d=the distance traveled one way. That works out to t2=0 . That is when I saw the trick! When you know the math necessary to plow through a problem you usually just work through it mathematically until you've come up with an answer. It's almost an automatic process.
Actually, you left a hole in your statement of the problem.
The Einstein version explicitly specifies 1 mile up and 1 mile back. Your version does not specify the length of the route, and does not specify that the return trip is the same distance. So I could take the direct route getting there at 30 mph, and a much longer alternate route getting back, which would allow me an average speed of 60mph
Not interested.....After all, I have my own lone idiot audience........Don't forget to tip the waitress......LOL!
I think your right... It's like the old frog in the hole problem.. :)
Well she was probably not a very good barmaid!
Even more so if considered old back then when the question was given in '34.
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