It's so true. You math majors really need to see it. As John Derbyshire describes his undergraduate years:
It is a fact, though, that the cartoon does represent the way a lot of mathematicians think. Math undergraduates — my cohort, anyway — are terrible intellectual snobs. We were just about willing to forgive physicists for actually using our precious theorems, but heaven only knew what chemists and biologists got up to in those filthy labs of theirs, and the "soft sciences" — psychology, sociology, and the like — were beneath contempt. As for people who studied literature and history (what's the difference?), well, they were just figures of fun. "You mean to say they'll give you a degree just for reading novels? Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo! Hey, listen to this, guys …"
I really am a math snob.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
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1 comment:
That cartoon is originally from xkcd.com. He has a bunch of computer, math, and psychology related cartoons on there. Half I don't understand and half are funny.
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