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The New York Times published an article in its magazine about one of the greatest mathematicians living today, Terry Tao. The first paragraph should whet one's appetite for the rest of the article:
This April, as undergraduates strolled along the street outside his modest office on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mathematician Terence Tao mused about the possibility that water could spontaneously explode. A widely used set of equations describes the behavior of fluids like water, but there seems to be nothing in those equations, he told me, that prevents a wayward eddy from suddenly turning in on itself, tightening into an angry gyre, until the density of the energy at its core becomes infinite: a catastrophic ‘‘singularity.’’ Someone tossing a penny into the fountain by the faculty center or skipping a stone at the Santa Monica beach could apparently set off a chain reaction that would take out Southern California.
There are some people who are just too smart, and this guy is one of them.
(Score: 4, Informative) by mendax on Sunday July 26 2015, @03:02AM
Since I am the person who wrote the "dumbass WTF comment", I thought I should say something about it.
There are some people who are currently are or have lived on this planet who are very scary intellectually, and this guy is one of them. In reading this article, he reminds me a lot of John von Neumann, the brilliant Hungarian-American mathematician, scientist, early computer scientist, government bureaucrat, etc. etc., who accomplished incredible things in his far too short life. His intellect was like Terry Tao's: he made the rest of us look as smart as our dogs by comparison. However, Tao and von Neumann shared one very special important characteristic: they were both "super-normal", the term used by the article to describe Tao in the article, and as a result they were able to keep their respective egos in check. Von Neumann was an outgoing, gregarious man, who loved attending parties, telling dirty jokes, wearing funny hats, but despite his extraordinary intelligence was also very friendly and patient with "normal" people.
So, I wouldn't say my comment is "[s]ome kinda adolescent crush", but rather a form of admiration and envy. It's difficult for super-intelligent people to come down to everyone else's level.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2015, @04:05AM
GP AC here. I take that back (for what that's worth).