• Rose@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    56
    ·
    1 day ago

    This is no laughing matter. There used to be a Wikipedia category for scientists who committed suicide. (With a subcategory: Mathematicians who committed suicide.) Probably removed because it got overly broad or something.

    Submitted it to Reddit’s r/MorbidReality once, they just fucking removed it. Reddit mods are assholes.

    • immutable@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      1 day ago

      There’s a great book called “the advent of the algorithm” and it has a chapter about how frequently logicians lose their minds and take their lives.

      • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 hour ago

        working with abstract ideas alienates you from other human beings as you see the world in a fundamentally different way than most people and you lose touch with social norms that are the building-blocks of social connection. it doesn’t help that folks also tend to treat you like your a freak/monster because they are terrified of things they don’t understand, like logic or pure mathematics.

        even talking about how logic works at a 101 level is going to make people resent you in a casual social situation. and advanced logic is basically witchcraft for anyone not working that field, of which there are maybe a hundred or two globally.

        out of 9/10 people I meet, who find out my academic background, become immediately hostile to me about it. as my graduate degree is some sort of personal attack on them. shit’s wild. and the 1 person who isn’t offended by it is mostly because they just don’t care and don’t judge people for stuff like that. maybe 1/50 I meet thinks it’s a positive or interesting thing and 1/2 of those folks will get offended because I don’t know about some obscure thing they think is related to my field, but isn’t at all.

    • TheRealKuni@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 day ago

      This reminds me of the book Three-Body Problem, which has a whole bunch of physicists going down the suislide near the beginning.

      • moonshadow@slrpnk.net
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        What’s the common denominator here bud?

        If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day…

  • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    16 hours ago

    Seems to me that the sentence you want to highlight is “Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.”

  • farmgineer@nord.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    18 hours ago

    Huh, I must’ve read that at some point previously, though I don’t remember it.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    1 day ago

    “The Ring” movie was based on this book, with Japan and Hollywood taking their usual liberties and slightly changing it.

  • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 day ago

    I had a professor who called it “Sadistical Thermo-god-damn-its”

    When i took it it wasn’t that bad but maybe our professor went easy on us.

      • xxce2AAb@feddit.dk
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        Speaking on higher-order infinities, let’s take pity on the MAGA crowd: Of the uncountably many things they’ll never understand is just how hot Cantor’s diagonal argument is. Just look at it, squeezed into that tightly-packed matrix.

    • Gladaed@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 day ago

      Both of those are pretty tame in comparison. Thermodynamics isn’t for the faint of heart.

      • xxce2AAb@feddit.dk
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        1 day ago

        I personally wouldn’t call the former particularly tame, and the latter of the two comes with the additional burden of knowing that you’re the engineer of our collective end rather than just a student of it.

        But I’m not going to argue that grappling with Thermodynamics is easy either. I’m not that far gone.

      • AmyAye@nord.pub
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 day ago

        Like half my ME courses in college were basically the same Thermodynamics stuff repacked in a new way.

        (Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer, IC Engines, at least 2 others I forget the name of).

        • Gladaed@feddit.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 day ago

          Theoretical Thermodynamics and Statistic Physics is different from applied thermodynamics. The latter is fiiinnnneeee. The former is mind melting. I don’t know how deviously engineers get tortured. The gloves come off for physics students for sure.

          • NewSocialWhoDis@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            18 hours ago

            Agree. I took Thermodynamics in my Undergraduate Aerospace Engineering coursework, and it was one of my favorite classes. I took Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics in my Applied Physics Masters, and it was one of the hardest courses I’ve taken.

          • AmyAye@nord.pub
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 day ago

            Engineers probably don’t get it that hard. Like 90% of the thermodynamics stuff was using those little tables with the crooked rectangles (it’s been like 25 years, I don’t remember what they are called).

            Plus MEs are like a weird “Jack of all trades” for stuff. We did a little Civil Engineer, a little Electrical Engineering, a little Physics, a little Chemistry, but none of it goes super super deep. And I don’t think it’s as reversed for these individual things. Like, at least at the time, I could do "basic to mid CE and EE stuff, but I don’t think CEs and EEs could do anything but CE and EE stuff.