Comment by jerryhuang100 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerryhuang100 | Hacker News Reader

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I second this as the article is very wrong, very misleading, and very last-last gen about math and today's biology. There is even no advanced Biology/Medicine programs (under/grad/whatever) in the world without the Biostatistics as the required core course. Oh, by the way, interested in Biological research but with a low Quantitative score in your GRE? Well, good luck with that!

And "Think twice, though, about specializing in fields that require ... quantitative analysis....as well as a few specialties in molecular biology." Come on! Even a simple DNA agarose gel requires your careful calculations about the gel percentage and some basic interpolation for DNA sizes.

Basically WSJ has been turned into the Rant Mountain and the rants like "Great Scientist ≠ Good at Math" or "To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me” won't be the last two.

He is totally right and I have seen many many examples of it in grad school. The fact is, US's quantitative GRE is a joke even for mid-high school students in other countries. I take it that he says to become a good scientist in many fields, you don't need Tensors, stochastic PDEs, calculus of variations, group and field theory, functional analysis, path integrals etc. You can get by only mastering single variable calculus, statistics and some basic linear algebra.

If that WSJ book promotion op is not disturbing enough about math, here is what PBS summarized [1]:

"Mathematical skill is not essential, and neither is a genius IQ, he says. Of more importance is creativity, deep thinking, confidence, commitment and allegiance to the small, informal experiments."

And what EO Wilson said himself: "I found out that advances in science rarely come upstream from the ability to stand at a blackboard and conjure images from unfolding mathematical proposition and equations. They are instead the product of downstream imagination leading to hard work, during which mathematical reasoning may or may not prove to be relevant."

There is nothing about Calculus, ODE/PDE, stochastic modeling, or whatever. He explicitly refers to mathematical reasoning and skills.

I can't wait to see this book promotion op appears on The Colbert Report.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/03/post-27.html

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