Mockery of Mathematics with Sridhar Ramesh | The Downside with Gianmarco Soresi 186 | Comedy Podcast
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- Опубликовано: 5 фев 2024
- Mathematician (and comedian!!!) Sridhar Ramesh joins us to share the downsides of growing up in New Jersey (and why people should stop asking where in Jersey), fulfilling his reputation as the class genius, and the heckler that almost ruined his thesis defense.
Gianmarco and Russell also discuss why the hell Deborah Messing is following the podcast’s Instagram account and they make Sridhar do some math on the fly.
Follow Sridhar at
/ radishharmers
Follow Russell Daniels at:
/ russelljdaniels
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More about Gianmarco:
Gianmarco Soresi is a stand-up comedian, actor, and a little too much for some people. He’s told jokes on The Late Late Show with James Corden, Comedy Central, Netflix’s Bonding, Don’t Tell, The Real Housewives of New York for some reason, and he was a JFL New Face in 2022. He’s acted in Billy Crystal’s Here Today, Hustlers, The Last OG, and in his theater days shared the stage with some people who’ve gone on to become huge real estate agents. You can see him post the kind of crowdwork clips that are arguably destroying the artform of stand-up comedy everywhere @gianmarcosoresi and he obviously has a podcast called The Downside with Gianmarco Soresi.🎤
#GianmarcoSoresi #StandUp #Comedy 
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The Princeton Neuroscience building was developed entirely around the idea that smart people like writing equations on windows (most walls are made at least partially of clear dry-erase glass) and it has become unironically a signifier of which professors are either proud or insecure about their "mathiness" because they always have the most equations written on the hall-facing windows
This feels low key unhinged. Like no one, in all this time paused and calling this out as obviously counter productive?
The face Russell makes when asked to do math on the spot made me weeze laugh. Thank you for the joy
Holy shit, he learned that it's "count your blessings" and not "count your blessing"!!! I've been waiting for him to fix that for like 50+ episodes 😂 Thank you for always improving Gianmarco
It’s cool to see me represented on this podcast by a nerd also interested in formal logic!
Oh shit he worked on 3 Blue 1 Brown! I love that, that channel is super interesting 😁🤗
I liked the probability video about darts and multidimensional spheres, super cool
57:25 "who is this for???" Russell is asking the important question 😂
I can't believe these white boys have never heard Johnny Cash's song "A boy named Sue" AND I HAVE!!! WTF
Yeah that was surprising
i can`t wait for miss Debra Messing see this episode after her comments on their IG post!!! some one tell her right now!!!
wait what did she comment???
Great having Sridhar on this episode. It was great!
1:09:20 At this timestamp, Sridhar begins talking about his dissertation issues. Not the same field, but pretty close, I have mine PhD in computer science (deep learning), and my area is math-heavy, where we tend to have proofs, but our math is a bit more applied. I'm worried (and a bit confused) on how he struggled writing the dissertation to the point of leaving it for ten years. Given a lot of our time is spent writing papers, whether for conferences or journals or something else, the dissertation tends to be simple but very time consuming. Your advisor and/or committee would be getting regular updates on it, and also including portions of papers you've written in it (not verbatim, of course). I guess his experience is very different from mine and the people I've talked with. I wonder what school this was and if his department just didn't put the resources into their students like they should have. I'm super glad he went back and finished it. That by itself is a feat and huge accomplishment. I kind of hope he or other grad students in his department talked to the faculty about problems like this.
I can see someone reaching that 7-year mark and being demoralized. My school has a hard limit of seven years for PhD. If you can't get it that point, they kick you out, so stress and pressure can really build. Professors usually try to have their students out by the 3rd- to 5th-year mark. There are many stories of students being stuck in their program for years and years, not being able to graduate, because the professors view their students as cheap labor. When I hear people spend 7+ years on their PhD, I start to worry if they're in that situation unknowingly, or they _do_ know but they've already invested so much time into it they desperately want it to end. They either stick to it because they feel they would've wasted that time, or they leave without the PhD.
Anywho, that's my tangent. It was great to hear Sridhar's perspective on the math PhD. I'm happy he finished it :) also great episode overall :)
I would say that things are different in different fields, even closely related ones. In many areas of pure math, unlike the norm in much of CS and other fields, it was common not to publish during grad school and to have one's dissertation turn into one's first few publications after the PhD (though this is not true of all areas of math, and also has been changing recently).
There were three other students in the Logic PhD program at Berkeley my year. Of those three, one finished in six years, two finished in seven years. Similarly, the year after me there were two students, one of whom finished in six years and the other of whom finished in seven years. I would thus not say my seven years in the program was unusual, and being out by the 3rd to 5th year mark was unheard of to unusual, respectively. Of course in other fields, things are different, but I do not think this was an indictment of the department.
The reasons I left grad school at the time had almost nothing to do with grad school, math, my department, or any such thing. I had other things going on in my life, but I don't want to talk about them. After leaving grad school, of course the push to finish the PhD drops dramatically, as does the time to work on it when one has other full-time employment. I wasn't actively working on it for those ten years away. But I'm glad I did eventually finish it! I will be turning my dissertation into papers now and hopefully can still make some mark in my area of math.
Thanks for watching the episode! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
(Incidentally, re: PhD students being viewed as cheap labor for the professors, this to some extent happens in math as well, but not I think to the same extent as in other fields. Although PhD students do serve as cheap labor in the sense of TAing courses (and I would advocate for them to be paid more highly for this!), math students do not serve as research labor for their professors in quite the same way as in some other fields. They do not run experiments for their professors like in the physical sciences, and in math there is not a convention of advisors being credited as co-authors on student's papers. Papers list their authors alphabetically with equal credit, tend not to have as many authors, and only list authors who significantly contributed, as opposed to other fields which have a "PI as executive producer author credit" dynamic.)
@@RadishHarmers Hey, wow thanks for replying! I honestly wasn't even expecting that to be read lol and definitely wasn't expecting a reply, I was just typing out my thoughts. I hope it didn't come across as sounding contrary to your experience. I'm sorry if it did. I've just heard so many grad students' horror stories, I had a passing thought that you might also have been going through similar things. I'm glad that wasn't the case for you!
Ok, it's good that it wasn't on your department as to why you didn't finish your dissertation during your initial time there. And yeah it's completely understandable that other reasons could come into play that can affect that, I didn't consider that. Six to seven years for PhD is a bit unheard of in my field but I guess it's really that different. That's why my first thought was along the lines of "that department might be stringing them along," but that's not the case and that's good. Since, like you said, the other students in your year finished in seven, and the year after you had similar timeframes, it's likely normal to see six to seven years there.
In my department, for people finishing around three years, they usually got their Master's at the same school and the same department, so the PhD timeline was shorter. If you include Master's, then it's another one and a half to two years, so around five years. The people who went straight from Bachelor's to PhD or transferred in with their Master's spend about four to five years, so it starts to be about the same length of time in the one department. So that's generally why I thought the initial length of your PhD was unusual to me, but it makes complete sense. I got my Master's at the same place I did my PhD, so Master's was two years, and PhD was three.
The thing about publishing is pretty different in CS. We're expecting to publish during our time working towards the degree. Some professors in my department want their students to have at least three published papers before they consider graduating them, although it's not a strict requirement. Two students the year before me only had one journal publication before they graduated under my advisor. He doesn't have that publication requirement, but he pushes for it. I haven't talked to many math grad PhD students about publishing, but if I get the chance I'll definitely see how different our experiences are :D
Since you're planning on getting some publications out of your dissertation, I'll be sure to be on the lookout for them! Again, thanks for replying! Sorry again if my original comment came off as contrarian, that wasn't my intention. Good luck with your future publications!
i’m so hard reading all of this.
Yes to anonymous work. The filtering processes you describe _suppress revolutionary politics_ and suppressing revolutionary politics costs human lives, not to mention suffering, every day.
A bit came to my mind: you know how musicians in the audience put faces at musicians at the stage when they hear something amazing? Pseudo-orgasmic shrunk faces like saying "you m*thef*ckr, that's awesome!". Do mathematicians do the same while someone is writting an explanation on the board?
it’s called stank face. when musicians like what they’re hearing, they’ll look like they smell something really bad while jamming
OMG, I've been wondering about Hasan and Nicki's names for years!
I'm someone who loves math and is terrible at it! But I'm fascinated by it and keep playing with it, well into my middle age 😊
"Eventually, one of the names would have to be infinity."
Sridhar was answering a different version of this question, but taking this question at face value, the answer is "no, it wouldn't." It's well known in the field of linguistics that English, for example (or any natural human language) can form a large infinity of possible sentences. And it's easy to show that, in particular, it's possible to form an infinity of names _without using the word Infinity_ for example by calling the first number "Cops kill poor people", the second number "cops kill more poor people," the third number "cops kill more and more poor people" and so on adding "more and"s. Or less interestingly, you could call the first number "one," the second number "one one," and so on.
There's a relevant technical bit about "countable infinities" versus "uncountable infinities" that you'd need to bring a mathematician back on to explain.
I didn't get anything wrong. It's just a choice of how to interpret with some charity the things people have said informally.
The idea child Gianmarco was informally expressing was clearly something like "If there are, say, the numbers zero, one, and two, and we want to describe how many things are in {zero, one, two}, then the answer to that question is some number, for which we have made up the name 'three'. And then to describe the amount of things in {zero, one, two, three}, there is also some number, which we have given the name 'four'. And then we also have the number of things in {zero, one, two, three, four}, let's make up for this the name 'five'. And continuing in just this same way, we ought allow ourselves also to say there is some 'number' of things in {zero, one, two, three, four, five, and everything else you can get in this way finitely…}, whatever random name we choose to call it, and that number is an infinity. It ought just as well be considered a 'number' as all the previous iterations in this process, since it's just doing the same thing".
Child Gianmarco is perfectly reasonable in pushing back on his father in this way, with this argument (which is not really about syntax for names, though the word "name" was used). And certainly one can formalize this idea which Gianmarco was getting at, and make up a name (such as "infinity" or "∞" or "ω" or "ℵ_0" or whatever; the specific choice of name or symbol doesn't matter, what's in a name?) and say "This is the number of things in {0, 1, 2, 3, and so on…}". Depending on exactly how one formalizes this, this brings one to e.g. the concepts which in jargon are called the "transfinite ordinal numbers" or "transfinite cardinal numbers" (as you have hinted at in the end of your comment). And indeed, mathematicians do often call these "numbers", even as they might at other times incongruously say mindless slogans like "Infinity is not a number, it's merely a concept". It's a meaningless distinction, as I said.
Not that you are arguing with me on this broader point, but, to flesh out what I was saying about infinity as a number:
Even transfinite cardinals and ordinals are not the whole conversation on infinity as a number. There are many other numerical systems of note too in which we have entities called "infinity" which we reason with in much the same way as with archetypal "numbers"; e.g., in the projectively extended numbers or affinely extended numbers, though those were not the examples child Gianmarco was thinking of.
There's no use saying some numbery things are numbers while other numbery things must not be considered numbers but merely concepts. All numbers are concepts. The counting number three is the concept "A thing, and another thing, and another thing". That's just some logical concept, same as the concept of being infinite. When new concepts have some family resemblance to concepts we already call numbers, we may as well call them some kind of number too. I am with Wittgenstein on this:
“And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a 'number'? Well, perhaps because it has a direct relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this may be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things that we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fiber on fiber. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibers.
…I can… use the word 'number' for a rigidly limited concept, but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept is not closed by a frontier. And this is how we do use the word 'game'. For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn. (But that never troubled you before when you used the word 'game'.)” -Philosophical Investigations, §§67-68
Totally agree with you on number vs concept, @@RadishHarmers. Even without getting fancy, the nature of the infinity involved depends on whether we're talking about integers vs real numbers, for example, and certainly all those are called "numbers." There's no reason very good reason not to also call the "point at infinity" on the extended complex plane a number, too.
As for the answer to Gianmarco's question, you and I were answering different questions. You interpreted from his words a question about whether the notion of infinity deserves to be called a number. I interpreted from the same words a question about whether an infinite number of names can be chosen without choosing the particular name "infinity." This question could also arise from confusion about the nature of infinity, in particular over the wrong but intuitive idea that "infinity must mean you aren't skipping anything."
The only place I disagree with you is in the word "clearly" here, as it's still not totally clear to me whether he intended one of these questions, or something else entirely: "The idea child Gianmarco was informally expressing was _clearly_ something like..."
I edited my comment to remove any suggestion that you were wrong. Happy Weekend, fck up some radishes.
@@bumpty9830 When I heard Gianmarco's story, I also thought he was talking about the idea that "if there's an infinitely countable amount of numbers, we must _at some point_ use the word 'infinity' as the name for a specific number," in which I replied in my head, "no, that's not the case, since if there's an infinitely countable amount of numbers, that also implies there's an infinitely countable amount of words to name those numbers, and we only have to avoid one word, where we'd still have an infinite amount of other words to choose from,". But I can see Sridhar's interpretation of it now and get why he answered that way with this new context.
Yeah, I think Sridhar's interpretation is more likely what Gianmarco had in mind. Glad I wasn't the only one to hear this version though, @@Djinnerator.
As a mathematician, the math made this extra hilarious
35:23 YES. This was also the beginning of intellectual stimulation for me! I spent so much time just sitting and thinking about that rectangle. They did tell us the “reason” but I always felt like I was the only one whose mind was blown that 5 3’s is the same as 3 5’s. I used to like test it out mentally even after I saw that by counting up. And I straight up did not understand why everyone else wasn’t like… stoked about this new phase of reality.
I am still a little mad tbh about the fact that no one answered my “why does ice float” question to my satisfaction until high school when we covered water polarity. No one had been able to give me the proof other than saying “solids are when the molecules are closer together” …. Haha it’s… mostly not a big deal anymore.
I’m terrible at arithmetic
"Mathemagician","methamatician", i think it's time to add some magic to mathematics. It would manifest as drugged mathematicians solving the 6 unsolved matters or...creating more of them. Fun is the only rule
100% agreed with the this has got to stop about asking where in NJ I’m from! I’m from Watchung (so of course I know New Providence) but like 95% of the time no one has ever heard of it
what’d you call me
This was such a fun one. Loved it!
as a theoretical physicist i do care more about the abstract concepts but i just dont like proofs that much, and yes im still alienated from my girlfriend (quantum physics)
As a person who sucks at math and cs and wants to understand them this was really enlightening
3blue1brown!! that channel is saving me in linear algebra/matrices right now lol thank you for your important contributions to the success of college students everywhere sridhar
2:54 I'm new! Decided to check out the podcast after finding your comedy
"And we run the scoring system, that's even worse" oh man
Edit at the top because it's more important: Boy Named Sue has a sequel from the perspective of the dad and it's a ride.
Don't wait to watch Citizen Kane. It's more watchable than the prestige would have you believe.
Nicki Minaj's dad is Indo-Trinidadian, but the "Minaj" is not her real name. It's just a stage name.
russel rocking the subtle magician look
Yes! I love when Russel GOES OFF during this has got to stop
fuck, I know it hasn't been that long but you have to get him on again. Haven't laughed this much in a long time. Cool to have someone with expertise in such a different field whose also got great comedic instincts
1:32:20 - the mistake was using your real name online. Use your government name at work and an alias online
WOW. I did not know that about President Macron! OMG
59:10 I love 3Blue1Brown. Also, people use the word math to describe arithmetic too often.
I would like to know his thoughts on statistics
odds are, you already know.
Omg. I was terrible at math. (Like middle school and highschool I almost got all the way through algebra and geometry without doing the forty to sixty questions of homework at night with middling test scores, but understanding everything up until we got to the graphs. And my memorization for the times tables was terrible). I ended up taking a remedial math class cause I failed geometry, and it was like balancing a checkbook. But the thing he said about being six and wanting to understand the why or how it was applicable was exactly the frustration I had with math in both the "smart kid" and the remedial math classes. Like I knew I was never gonna just remember all the formulas. And some of the tests you could keep the formula with you or you just learned about those formulas so you were obviously going to remember to use it? It was just so boring and pointless to me. The chapters rarely really explained (at least in a way I understood) how it was applicable to life. Not just in a "well if you get a job as a carpenter some day" way, but like... the sort of thing that's in nature, or idk cell structure or seeds in an apple, fibbanachi sequence. It was so hard to try to explain that I didn't understand. Of course I understood you just... applied the formula in the book, but don't you want me to apply this to life? I had those moments a lot as a kid, where an adult wouldn't understand what I was asking for, that I was asking for *more* so I could more widely apply the answer to other things, but they only wanted me to do it wrote. (My mom wifh cooking). It just killed my curiosity for those things. That I had no one to ask or explain it, because books were only explaining how it was done, not how it was applied to the world. Idk how often other people have experienced that, but I look back and it was like a feather plucked, another moment where you permanently made yourself smaller to fit into a world that demands you be big, but also a world that doesn't provide the resources and expects you to never be more than a standard child.
Russell was actually interested in hearing the answers and wanted to make related questions, like a good conversation, and gianmarco was... there
matt parker of @standupmaths is a comic and mathematician
New Jersey is such a small state physically lmfao just answer “yes” when someone asks if yr city is by another city and then the convo is over
everyone now going to tag you in that clip
51:30 Ricci flow
has many applications.
I was a Merchant Ivory gal. Can you tell I have a British colonial heritage? Sigh.
Gianmarco would look good with like a fun nail polish color like yellow or multi colored
GM Have you been working out? Your arms look stronger.
Thank yooooooo
8:25 john pinette!!! RIP❤️❤️
1:31:39 Interesting idea; nom du travail
What was Ramesh’s Putnam score?
37:42 .. disagree... this assumes you will reach infinity by counting... you will not... EVER reach infinity by counting...
Nicki Minaj is Indian!!! She is Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian!!! About 30% of Trinidadians are of Indian descent.
You are a hot performer