A dissertation I do not understand

[sparrowtm]

PDF: http://math.stanford.edu/theses/tarn_thesis.pdf

Tarn Adams, the author of the document above, is better known as "Toady One", the brain behind the game Dwarf Fortress.
I was intrigued by his method of coding, and tried to find out more about his background. This is how I discovered this
dissertation. There are two things that keep me from understanding his work:

1.) While I speak English fluently, there are too many words I can't make any sense of - and if I do, it takes a lot of effort
to put them into context.

2.) I lack the mathematical knowledge to understand what the heck he is talking about.

Therefore, I would be very grateful if someone could -in layman terms- explain to me what it is that Tarn is writing about.
Thank you very much.

[Steel]

PDF: http://math.stanford.edu/theses/tarn_thesis.pdf

Tarn Adams, the author of the document above, is better known as "Toady One", the brain behind the game Dwarf Fortress.
I was intrigued by his method of coding, and tried to find out more about his background. This is how I discovered this
dissertation. There are two things that keep me from understanding his work:

1.) While I speak English fluently, there are too many words I can't make any sense of - and if I do, it takes a lot of effort
to put them into context.

2.) I lack the mathematical knowledge to understand what the heck he is talking about.

Therefore, I would be very grateful if someone could -in layman terms- explain to me what it is that Tarn is writing about.
Thank you very much.

Give up.

There is no 'layman's terms' that truly give an adequate representation of a Ph.D. thesis in pure mathematics. Any explanation you go 'Ok thanks, that makes sense' to would be an insult to the actual work that is described in the paper, and bear no resemblance to it whatsoever.

Look up 'vector space' and then do some courses in linear algebra and geometry and you'll have the basis to understand the statement of the problem.

[Simon_Jester]

While I wouldn't put this as bluntly as Steel did, he's right.

With science, you can usually explain something if you're careful. But mathematics is all about the advanced-math concepts, and if there's no specific application, there's just nothing in the paper that the layman will have a word for. It might be possible for someone who was themself a graduate student in pure mathematics to explain the material to someone with a lower level of math education. But there's a sharp limit on how low that level of math education can go before the material becomes impossible to understand.

Most people, even most technical specialists, are below that limit. It would require several stages of explanation to work this out: a math grad student (in approximately the right field) to translate it into terms that could be understood by, say, a senior-level math major. Then someone else to translate that into something a sophomore could follow. Then possibly yet a third step to translate that into something you could understand if your math education stopped in high school.

The resulting document would probably be longer than the thesis.

[darthdavid]

The resulting document would probably be longer than the thesis.

You'd basically have to write a specialized textbook to teach all the concepts each successive layer of complexity is built on.

[Gil Hamilton]

Probably, but the thing is that a doctoral thesis is meant for a very specific audience, not the general public. I proofread a doctoral thesis for someone who graduated from my old group and I knew what he was talking about, but that's because I was already familiar with exactly what he was doing. In another I read because it was relevant to my research (well, I read it because the post-doc is an antisocial git who said "Here, read this" rather than answering a simple clarification), the woman who wrote it would seem to be pulling equations and approximations out of thin air, but if you were in the know already (as her commitee was) then it would make sense.

[Sarevok]

One thing I am curious though - how many people produces doctoral thesis work that is actually useful ? One of my aunts, a medical doctor, once joked that many people produce "table thesis". A lot of paperwork that is technically sound but done for sake of getting higher academic qualification not advancing the field of knowledge. That is a "table thesis" you are merely sitting down in your lab/study and producing volumes of material so someday you get a better job with your PhD. Rather than going out there and trying to truly discover/invent something new.

I am not saying everyone should produce same level of seminal work as the great minds of centuries before. But maybe our society's insistence on having as many degrees as possible has robbed the notion of becoming a PhD of it's meaning.

[Simon_Jester]

To an extent, the Ph.D. does serve as proof of qualification to do the kind of work entailed in the jobs Ph.D.s are employed to do, and that does get circular. Then again, you could say the same about the master's thesis.

[PeZook]

Besides, it's not like 90% of all scientific work is tedious crap, right? Tedious crap that's nevertheless important to someone, somewhere as a reference in further research.

Look at the work the "great minds" did in the early days of naturalist science: it was stamp collecting. They basically went around listing things and collating them into books. Material properties, animal and plant species, disease...some people did experiments, but they were also very basic. You had guys spending half their lives to make mathematical tables...you get the idea.

And without those books, science would've never moved forward. A lot of those "table thesis" things are (somewhat) like that - running experiments to answer some minor question nobody bothered with so far, doing meta-studies based on other people's work, etc.

[Simon_Jester]

The trick is that for every person who gets remembered as some kind of legendary genius for their work, there were dozens of much less remarkable people who did all the tedious shit like PeZook mentions. Einstein wasn't the only person studying physics in 1905; he was just the guy who made a disproportionate number of the breakthroughs. Meanwhile, a huge number of people in (what we would now call) physics were writing thesis-level papers on material properties, electromagnetic phenomena that we now consider forgettable, and so on.

[Akhlut]

And to use biology for an example: Charles Darwin spent eight years studying barnacles.

Eight years studying barnacles.

He said about it afterward, "I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship."

So, yeah, science has always been about exhaustive study of the small, constituent parts of nature because nature is composed of a large number of small things. However, luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you view it) for biology, even the hundred and fifty year old studies can be useful for people doing recent research, so that even today, an interpid young crustacean researcher might look at Charles Darwin's old notes and find them useful today for their scientific value, not just historical curiosity. I'd assume that's still true of most sciences, even if it is a much lesser extent (mostly material properties of stuff that hasn't been looked at in 80 years).

[cosmicalstorm]

One thing I am curious though - how many people produces doctoral thesis work that is actually useful ? One of my aunts, a medical doctor, once joked that many people produce "table thesis". A lot of paperwork that is technically sound but done for sake of getting higher academic qualification not advancing the field of knowledge. That is a "table thesis" you are merely sitting down in your lab/study and producing volumes of material so someday you get a better job with your PhD. Rather than going out there and trying to truly discover/invent something new.

I am not saying everyone should produce same level of seminal work as the great minds of centuries before. But maybe our society's insistence on having as many degrees as possible has robbed the notion of becoming a PhD of it's meaning.

I would bet that more than one very important discovery has been made by someone who might have thought he was doing useless junk before he got started. Now if there was a sure-fire way to decide in advance what to look closer at and what to avoid... well I guess that would be similar to a singularity or something like that.

[Gil Hamilton]

One thing I am curious though - how many people produces doctoral thesis work that is actually useful ? One of my aunts, a medical doctor, once joked that many people produce "table thesis". A lot of paperwork that is technically sound but done for sake of getting higher academic qualification not advancing the field of knowledge. That is a "table thesis" you are merely sitting down in your lab/study and producing volumes of material so someday you get a better job with your PhD. Rather than going out there and trying to truly discover/invent something new.

I am not saying everyone should produce same level of seminal work as the great minds of centuries before. But maybe our society's insistence on having as many degrees as possible has robbed the notion of becoming a PhD of it's meaning.

Define "useful". Both theses I mentioned provided advances in their respective fields, but new information about the circumstellar envelope of VY Canis Majoris and it's chemical composition isn't TOO useful except in a very philosophical sort of way, while the first was largely technical solutions to doing better photoelectron spectroscopy. Neither affects the price of gas. What the doctor thesis does it it is a document of your work in graduate school and that you've developed the skill to carry a line of research to some conclusion in a rigorous scientific way, enough to earn your doctorate and despite the hardship that comes with being a graduate student (being paid for only 15 out of the 60 to 70 hours a week you are working, the strain on your relationship with friends and family, dealing with PIs and professors who really aren't reasonable or decent human beings, endless handshaking and politicing et cetera). If you actually invent or discover something that changes the world, good on yah, because that's spectacularly rare a thing. Doing earth shattering research is the lie that PIs tell prospectives to get them to join their group.

Very often, alot of the marketable skills that going into that thesis don't end up in the thesis. For example, a person may have to learn how to use LabView and become accomplished at machining parts in order to build the instrument to do the science their thesis is on, but you wouldn't know it from the thesis, but prospective employeers are sure interested in that you know how to make parts from CAD to machine shop and then make a computer operate those parts. PhDs are often alot more than the sum of their thesis that way.