The real thing was significantly more difficult. I gather that the consensus was that the test this October was actually significantly more difficult than the test last year as well.
The converse of these also hold. Engineers can often think that theoretical physics isn't as important as creating an artificial heart, physicists can think that pure mathematics is often fruitless and divorced from the real problems (and they're right in some circumstances; there is no denying...
I'm not certain that learning pure mathematics answers the question of why it works. You'll understand how the conclusions are drawn and develop a feel for the logic and art of deriving proofs and constructing theoretical frameworks, but this doesn't really touch on the...
Oh, sorry. I have this condition called word blindness where I skim a post and fill in the gaps with the phrase "I want to be a mathematician", only to later realize the error.
What was the subject matter of your two REUs? Do you have any particular research interests that you could articulate in any detail?
What sort of cryptography are you interested in? There has been quite a stir surrounding homomorphic encryption schemes. There is also algebraic...
If you haven't gotten the test back yet, how do you know you'll have a bad grade? Does he curve? It could be that no one in the class finished so there could well be a 20 point curve.
That chart is nonsense. 120 for an average college graduate? Surely that is based on some handful of flawed and out of date surveys that no longer have any validity. Also, Vos Savant's score was 228 on an outmoded ratio scale, and probably extrapolated to boot since no tests have ever had a...
Some of those are pretty strong schools. I was thinking there would be a slot maybe at some in the bottom 50 at best.
Produce it and ask around when you're done. Good luck finding something manageable to prove without a faculty specialist to guide you to the low hanging fruit though.ETA: Out...
I don't know, since the major was not even in math a high (above 80%) subject GRE could put them in good standing at some schools. I think Rensselaer actually let's you skip quals if you get that percentile (which is kind of crazy to me, but could be beneficial to the OP since an 80%ile+ would...
It's no good, because then you get all of this muddled philosophizing and then a real scientist comes in and explodes all of the bad ideas! I would say that the best philosophers were also scientists or had a deep appreciation for science. Think of C.S. Peirce or Judea Pearl (with his work on...