Mindblowing dissertations | Hacker News Reader

Mindblowing dissertations

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I'm an advocate for graduate studies, provided that your situation allows it to be a financially responsible decision [0].

That said, there are a lot of limitations of the graduate system that make writing iconoclastic dissertations that experiment with form or are full-frontal assaults on dogma a very poor career choice. At least in my opinion.

For one, most institutions and most supervisors across most disciplines measure success by the number of papers one publishes, particularly in high-impact journals or prestige conferences. You also have about four-six years to make your mark and graduate.

Because of the paper requirements and the timeline, I can't find it in me to recommend anyone attempt anything but an approach they believe will consistantly yield publishable results. "Swinging for the fences" and taking a bold but risky approach to your research might be the more rewarding approach from a scientific perspective, since even a negative result is a result, but negative results are more often than not unpublishable.

All this to say, I _love_ research that is serious but playful. I love people who provide answers to wild questions. But I also think that if your goal is to graduate, writing your dissertation in the form of a comic is decision that will hurt you more often than it will help you.

FWIW, I'm not defending the status quo. I think we should challenge it, and I think as a community we should create more space for "high-risk" research. I think a great example of this is eLife, a journal that will publish every paper it's editor chooses to send for review, but includes the peer-reviews in the published work.

Anyway this was a bit of a rant, but kudos to folks following their intellectual curiosities through serious methods.

[0] I, for example, live in Quebec, Canada so my tuition is just a couple of thousand a year, and I'm lucky that my stipend is rather generous.

What was that famous math dissertation that simply gave a half-page counter-example for a certain well-established conjecture?

It's been decades since I saw it and all I remember that it featured Ω in the proof.

This one? https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1966-72-06/S0002-9904-1966...

Edit: I was a bit too fast don't think you mean this one, still a wonderful paper :)

Surely you mean Cleo, of math.stackexchange fame? https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/562694/integral-int...

edit: stackwhatever, sorry

My god, what am I looking at? Is this what mathematicians do all day? My brain hurts.

This seems to be leaning more towards applied mathematics rather than pure math.

I don't know enough math to understand the difference. I'm just glad there are people way smarter than me able to work in that field.

That's just such an academic ballsy move.

You all have your three hundred page defense of your research. Bah. Here's my half page massive Dick measuring proof.

I asked ChatGPT and it very confidently confabulated something about László Babai.

Louis de Broglie's dissertation [1] is mindblowing and quite cogent (at least in the English translation, but presumably in French too ...)

1. https://fondationlouisdebroglie.org/LDB-oeuvres/De_Broglie_K...

Has anyone found any regular sources for PhD theses in the computing sphere?

I recall looking a few years back and finding Cambridge had a good repository online but not sure of others, but I'll Google it again now

The Cambridge site is here:

https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/search?query=dc.type:(%22Th...

I wonder why more dissertations aren't written in an entertaining or "layperson" way as these are. Is it just deemed nonproper in the various communities?

Yep. I tried to write my dissertation in an accessible way, and my thesis committee's only feedback was on the style. They didn't even bother to read the content.

Then I dropped out and posted the dissertation on the web, instead. I didn't want to ruin it by making it "academic" enough.

It sounds (like a few other comments in this thread) like you didn't want to write a dissertation - you wanted to write a document more broadly communicating your thesis topic to a wider audience.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but if you think you would ruin it by turning it into a document written for (and to suit the needs of) the thesis committee, then it's not a dissertation.

similar experience here. I wrote a Masters dissertation and the feedback was effectively “why are you introducing and explaining any of these basic concepts, the audience is expert researchers who know this stuff already.” I wanted to be able to give it to a curious friend who isn’t an expert but has enough background that with some help they could understand what the dissertation project was doing.

Whoa that's brave move. most people just will yield to finish

Kudos to you

Do you mind share more on the story? Like which field? any repercussion?

Firstly, most people are bad at writing. Writing is a skill so like all other skills it stands to reason that most people won’t be good at it. When it comes to people who are writing a dissertation, you’re looking for the intersection of people who are good enough at the other discipline to be in the position of writing a dissertation (presumably for a PhD) and are also good at writing, so it’s going to be a small subset of people who are going to do that well. Not saying these people don’t exist (Feynman is a famous example, but there are others).

Secondly, writing a dissertation is hard. Technical vocabulary, jargon etc generally exists because it is a helpful shortcut to communication with experts in a particular field. So for most people, writing their dissertation such that it could be readable by a layperson would generally make an already hard thing harder and doesn’t add anything in particular that’s helpful to experts (if anything might make it harder for experts because they would need to wade through things that are redundant or unnecessary to their understanding) so you’re making it harder in a way that doesn’t particularly benefit you. Why do that?

A graduate student is shouldering both the opportunity cost of spending more time, and the risk of not finishing. Things can happen almost at random that can knock you off your horse or shoot it out from under you. Like, your advisor can lose funding, change jobs, or even just up and die. You can get sick.

Once you've got a thesis worth of data (or whatever you need), your best bet is to write it up as clearly and concisely as will get you "published and outa here" in the words of my fellow grad students. Don't even spend time choosing a font. (A friend did that).

PhD students get a limited number of innovation tokens to spend. One of the many ways to spend them is on the form of the dissertation.

I think this somehow also depends on the institution

Think of it more like conforming to a certain communication standard, specific to the academic field. The language needs to be concise, precise, and correct use of terminology to avoid as much ambiguity as possible. Colloquial form of writing is often open to interpretation and may not be understood by international readers (for example), as cultural norms are different. Academic and technical communication on aims to eliminate these barriers.

A rare occurrence, a few months ago, I came across one (re: a dissertation that is both entertaining and for the lay): Neocosmicism: God and the Void (2013) by Ellen Greenham[1].

It seems like it eventually came into fruition as a full-fledged book: After Engulfment: Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frank Herbert (2022) by Ellen Greenham[2].

1: https://researchportal.murdoch.edu.au/esploro/outputs/doctor...

2: https://www.hippocampuspress.com/other-authors/nonfiction/af...

It takes a lot of skill to meaningfully communicate complex and deep topics to people who are not already familiar with the field.

Deemed non-proper in a lot of field and by many advisor (whose approval you need). But, also, technical vocabulary is specific which matter when you operate at the edge of knowledge.

The point of the dissertation is to become certified as a PhD. Most supervisors are not open to the idea of stepping outside the norm. Which is downright tragic, as research should be all about that.

My writing was actively criticized wherever I tried to use simple vocabulary. It was heartbreaking, and made me resent academia to this day.

Too much work, and you have to nail it or else you might get railed for a half-baked dissertation

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