What do Bill Gates and Richard Stallman have in common ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55

by pvdm • 16 years ago

71 23 16 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

teoruiz• 16 years ago

Shouldn't that read "What do Bill Gates and Richard Stallman have in common"?

MaysonL2• 16 years ago

<pedantry> What do Bill Gates and Richard Stallman have in common? </pedantry>

pvdm3• 16 years ago

MaysonL2• 16 years ago

nfnaaron• 16 years ago

They're both rich ... no.

They're both hairy ... no.

Ah - they both choose their computer systems based on stubborn adherence to software ideology.

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

They are way over-discussed on technical blogs, hero worship or demonization alike.

logicalmind• 16 years ago

If anyone is interested, here are the textbooks for the course:

Math 55a

* Required: Axler, Linear Algebra Done Right, Springer, 1997.

* Required: Artin, Abstract Algebra, Prentice-Hall, 1991. * Recommended: Halmos, Naive Set Theory, Springer-Verlag, 1974.

* Also useful: Halmos, Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces, Springer-Verlag, 1987.

* Also useful: Fulton and Harris, Representation Theory: A First Course, Springer-Verlag, 1991. See especially Appendix B.

* Also useful: Bott and Tu, Differential forms in Algebraic Topology, Springer-Verlag, 1982. See especially Chapter 1.

Math55b

* Required: Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis, McGraw-Hill, 1976.

* Required: Marsden and Hoffman, Basic Complex Analysis, Freeman, 1999.

* Recommended: Stein and Shakarchi, Fourier Analysis, an Introduction, Princeton University Press, 2003.

* Also useful: Stein and Shakarchi, Complex Analysis , Princeton University Press, 2003.

* Also useful: Bott and Tu, Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology , Springer, 1982. See especially 1.1-1.3.

* Also useful: H. M. Schey, Div, Grad Curl and All That , Norton, 2005.

* Also useful: Hubbard and Hubbard, Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra and Differential Forms, Prentice Hall 1999.

* Also useful: T. Needham, Visual Complex Analysis , Oxford University Press, 1997.

jgg2• 16 years ago

I feel vindicated in knowing that I either own or have already wishlisted a lot of these. (:

okmjuhb• 16 years ago

Math 55 isn't nice because of how much math it covers (you could take equivalent classes that cover the same material, just split up, at the same or higher level). It's nice because of the bonds it forges between the students, who are usually the top mathematical talent at Harvard. I'd suspect that it's these bonds that help the students throughout the rest of their mathematics education rather than their incoming ability or what the class teaches.

If you look at the problem sets, they're very hard (especially given that the students are all freshmen - a few of whom haven't ever done advanced mathematics before), but not unreasonably so (not really even beyond the top math majors of most top schools, I'd wager). Having made friends in a trial by fire like the 55 a/b series though, is a key to surviving later ones.

desponsible• 16 years ago

Did you take the class yourself or is it just a conjecture?

jollojou• 16 years ago

A year ago I took the course on calculus and group theory. I worked on the course 15 to 20 hours per week for three months and received a good grade.

The course was worth the effort. It enhanced my engineer identity and brought me self-respect. Now that I've passed the course, I'm much more confident about my self; I feel that I can solve difficult problems if I want to. I know that I can concentrate.

In short, putting your self through advanced mathematics is a great way to improve your capability of facing and handling difficult issues.

bravura• 16 years ago

I remember friends who took Math 55 pulling ridiculously long hours. It either makes you or breaks you as a potential mathematician.

One friend took up smoking, just so he would have an excuse to break.

Two friends ended up becoming philosophers, which is the mathematics of the humanities.

At the end of the class, they printed a t-shirt with a tiny little diagram on the breast, and "Math 55" on the back. The tiny little diagram? A Dynkin Diagram (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DynkinDiagram.html). As the story goes, Prof. Pavel Etingof, before introducing Dynkin Diagrams, said: "If aliens ever came to earth, and told us that we were primitive, I would say 'No, we are not primitive', and I would show them Dynkin Diagrams to prove it."

j_baker• 16 years ago

"Gates said the experience of taking a class "where everybody had an 800 on their SAT and 5 on their AP"

I'm a bit perplexed by this statement. An 800 on the SAT (even before they changed the scores) isn't a huge achievement is it?

pvdm3• 16 years ago

In the math portion, an 800 is a perfect score.

leif2• 16 years ago

Even so, it's not a huge achievement.

grasshoper• 16 years ago

It was much more difficult before they changed the scoring in the early 90s, but you're right that it really doesn't mean anything at that level. I didn't even know AP was around back then, but obviously nobody cares about a 5 on BC Calc or whatever. Gates understands that you have speak in terms more people can understand.

Goosey• 16 years ago

"In the class of 1970, only 20 of the 75 students who began the class finished it due to its difficulty."

Now I am curious if either BG or RS successfully COMPLETED the course (and hell, while we are at how well they did!)

jgg2• 16 years ago

From http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch04.html :

To ease the transition, Stallman fell back on his strengths: math and science. Like most members of the Science Honors Program, Stallman breezed through the qualifying exam for Math 55, the legendary "boot camp" class for freshman mathematics "concentrators" at Harvard. Within the class, members of the Science Honors Program formed a durable unit. "We were the math mafia," says Chess with a laugh. "Harvard was nothing, at least compared with the SHP."

To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an amazing class," says David Harbater, a former "math mafia" member and now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school."

Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20 by the end of the second semester. Of that 20, says Harbater, "only 10 really knew what they were doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics.

"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman."

No idea about Gates.

donaq• 16 years ago

That was a very interesting look into RMS' youth. Thanks for the link!

mkramlich• 16 years ago

From the title I fully expected to find out they both had studied under the same Shao-Lin Kung Fu Master. But many years ago, they had a falling out, after their master was murdered and each blamed the other for it. One dedicated himself to the pursuit of Evil. The other would walk the path of Light. Legend says they will one day meet again, and a great fight will occur, and only one will be left standing, and on that day, the world will finally learn what truly happened to their master.

Or maybe this is just me.

pvdm3• 16 years ago

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1931503/posts

What do Bill Gates and Richard Stallman have in common ?

Related Stories