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Comment by rifung | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy to see that there is someone who is trying to help those who don't want to or can't go the traditional route of undergrad => grad school. Certainly I'm sure there are many others like me who have a strong, but amateur interest in a subject. Here I mean amateur in the sense that it is unpaid and done only out of love, as opposed to some measure of skill.

Sadly I have no intention of studying theoretical physics. If anyone could point me towards something for theoretical computer science and algorithms I would be most grateful

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> If anyone could point me towards something for theoretical computer science and algorithms

Cheap trick: google up university course pages like [1], look at the syllabus and get the books listed. MIT's OpenCourseware has lots of stuff [2].

[1] http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~aho/cs3261/

[2] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

In addition to that you also can typically know how an undergraduate would progress in the courses from the universities as well, through stuff like graduation plans etc.

Hey thanks for the suggestion. I actually use this strategy already, but the issue is that this only tells you what the general stuff most people will learn is. As far as I know this doesn't help with finding what the current problems are in the field.

However, I think that professors generally are very willing to help people who are interested, even if you aren't a student. Actually as far as I can tell usually they don't even ask if you are a student.

Aside: that phrase "someone who is trying to help" makes me wonder whether you know that _this_ someone is a Nobel laureate (shared with Veltman in 1999), as he casually mentions in the text.

I did read it so yes I did know. I just feel like most active researchers would be able to point people in the right direction, so the fact that he's a Nobel laureate wasn't particularly relevant.

Nobel laureates don't typically cease research after receiving the award. He's still active.

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