Recent content by Martin_G

As much as I enjoy that intellectual exchange, the Snooker Masters is on, so that will be my last post here. The "general case", the "principle involved" of which you boast, is the third-grade statement that a three-dimensional object has three dimensions (gasp!), and thus doubling all three...

Dave, Don't patronize me. I'm not learning anything here, as nothing said in the last few posts is more than trivial and obvious. I get that 23=8. You spent a lot of words and numbers to demonstrate that, but I got it in the third grade or so. You, on the other hand, seem to assume that...

About as much as this does: I stated that the cube case is trivial four times already. Can you rigorously state volume grows by the cube for an arbitrary geometric shape?

I'm sorry, but the more I think about this, the less it makes sense to me. What does volumes grow by the cube mean? What does area grows by the square mean? These are, I think, utterly meaningless statements from a mathematical and physical standpoint, except for the obvious: volume is...

That would only be true for a cube, and I think that was one of Gould's errors. Consider two cylinders of the same radius r, one of height h and the other of radius 2h. The second has twice the volume of the first, but what can you say about the ratio of their surface areas? It could be almost...

Moonbear, 1. I think your reasoning is similar to Gould's: a bigger (that is, heavier) body without much more sophistication would require a proportionally smaller brain. Gould made a similar argument going the other way around: the ant's smaller (lighter) body has larger relative surface area...

Thanks, I looked it up and I also read one of the reviews referenced there. However, that doesn't answer the question. The enchephalization quotient quantifies a species' distance from the log-log regression line; it doesn't explain why the line has the slope it does (2/3), and it doesn't even...

Animal Brain size, body mass, and surface area S.J. Gould wrote a series of interesting articles (chapters 22-24 in Ever Since Darwin) about the ratio of body mass to brain mass among animal species. Bigger animals have bigger brains (of course) but the ratio is getting smaller: a human's brain...

This is an interesting and important post. It touches on some very important issues, personal and global. I'm in the same boat, minus the comment from the advisor. Here's how I'm going to decide what to do with myself: for the next 10 months or so, I'll be studying by a** off, both physics and...

I can go Darwinian on you and claim that there is no such thing as true altruism, and that all acts are selfish in some way or another. But, that's a topic for another discussion. As for the people who open free clinics in under-developed countries, they generally do not make a bundle of money...

lurflurf, you seem confused. My point was not that there's anything wrong about wanting money and landing a job that provides that money. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm just weary of people being disingenuous and telling me that they're doing what they're doing for any other purpose...

No school - none! - not even Harvard/MIT/Princeton - expects an undergrad math major to publish. An REU and some senior thesis, maybe, but not an actual publication.

Tongue-in-cheek, or are you serious? Have you actually convinced yourself that this is what you're doing? I am continually shocked by how people who are in it only for the money go to great lengths to convince themselves that they're doing it for the sake of humanity/society/greater good/whatever.

"A lot of my information comes from this talk that the head of the admissions committee gave about what MIT is looking for..." That explains your unrealistic over-emphasis on the SoP. Admissions committee members are as truthful as politicians when they talk to the public. They all sound the...

"The most important part of your application is the statement of purpose..." With all due respect, that's not even close to being true. GRE general, GRE subject, grades, letters of reference and research experience all count for more than the statement of purpose.