Fliptomato

We love rediscovering things and writing papers [1]. [1]: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

> there's other pretty important stuff that can still bubble up, like the person reinventing the wheel where a well known library could have been used I wouldn't call not using a well known library "reinventing the wheel". The wheel in that expression is a concept, not a implementation. A library is an implementation of a concept. Writing yourself code instead of using a library is a great way to learn about what that library does and the tradeoffs it makes. When I think about "reinventing the wheel" as something negative, I think about something like "Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations": https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

Slightly relevant classic: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

People often know about Isaac Newton but not Isaac Barrow. Or the greatest of all, the doctor that rediscovered integration in 1994. https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

First up, I am no expert, but I have traveled this road for a while so I'll share a bit. I see Susskind's theoretical minimum is plugged here. Good. That is a fantastic place to start. Start at the beginning. Skip nothing. Leverage what you know against what you don't. You remember how to find an extremum of a function from Cal 1? The first order necessary condition for an extreme point is that the derivative of the function be zero. Remember that when you get to (deterministic) optimization and a gradient needs to be zero. Next with a constrained optimization you will see the reformulation of an objective function and constraints into one functional by using new variables (Lagrange "multipliers") so that when the gradient of this new functional is zero, not only are you somewhere in the intersection of the constraints and the objective, but you also meet the first order conditions necessary for an extremum to be found. (Second order sufficiency conditions (SOSC) are needed to show that you aren't instead at an inflection point but we are moving fast and breaking things) Hmm, I didn't say that very well, but there is much intuition to be found in optimization problems. This will serve you well in physics. Calculus of variations: Nail down cold how to derive the Euler Lagrange Equations for a functional. Hint, Apply the FONC (first order necessary conditions for an extremum) to the functional (now the Action) in question. See Lanczos "Calculus of Variations"…

Perhaps you haven't heard about the doctor who rediscovered the trapezoid rule and had his article published in a respected, peer reviewed biology journal in 1994.[1] The paper is called "A mathematical model for the determination of total area under glucose tolerance and other metabolic curves" — and it got 75 citations (as of 2007). EDIT: Google Scholar lists 178 citations now [‽]. The abstract: "OBJECTIVE To develop a mathematical model for the determination of total areas under curves from various metabolic studies. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS In Tai's Model, the total area under a curve is computed by dividing the area under the curve between two designated values on the X-axis (abscissas) into small segments (rectangles and triangles) whose areas can be accurately calculated from their respective geometrical formulas. The total sum of these individual areas thus represents the total area under the curve. Validity of the model is established by comparing total areas obtained from this model to these same areas obtained from graphic method Gess than ±0.4%). Other formulas widely applied by researchers under- or overestimated total area under a metabolic curve by a great margin. RESULTS Tai's model proves to be able to 1) determine total area under a curve with precision; 2) calculate area with varied shapes that may or may not intercept on one or both X/Y axes; 3) estimate total area under a curve plotted against varied time intervals (abscissas), whereas other…

Absolutely. So wouldn't it be neat if premedical students and business majors had already seen a thorough stats class in high school, so that their college-level stats classes could spend less time on the basics and more time on those subtleties? (Speaking as someone who's taught calculus-based physics to premedical students, I think it's important to recognize that most folks who've taken a year of calculus really have not internalized those concepts enough to be fluent in applying them. I think it would take a particularly strong math background for someone to really understand the mathematical justifications for statistics, so I suspect class time would be better spent warning students about pitfalls than on hoping that they will draw meaningful conclusions from formal derivations. Heck, medical students are required to have taken calculus, but lots of them (evidently including a journal editor, peer reviewers, and 163 followup papers) apparently don't even know what an integral is: http://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discover… .)

Pafnuty Chebyshev, a Russian mathematician who discovered a bunch of important things, deliberately limited his intake of other mathematicians' works, in order to force himself think in original ways, not ways suggested by others' works. This medicine needs to be taken in moderation though, else one can end up reinventing some key wheels instead of speeding forward on these wheels, like https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

Right, the other side is when you end up with rediscoveries of the same ideas. The example that comes to my mind is when a medical researcher found the trapezoidal rule for integration again[1]. [1]: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

Something else less related that I find really useful about these chatbots is their ability to take some abstract explanation of some problem/attempts to tackle it, and it'll often spit out a name for it, and explain that this sort of problem is already well studied. That can be really difficult with other more traditional tools. I feel like this could be a big deal in science in general. People of different fields often do unnecessary extra work (as in reinventing the wheel) because they're not aware that there's, say, 10 years of research on it. To take an extreme example, just think of the poor fella doing medical research who rediscovered integration[0]. 0. https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

I'd like to discourage people from naming things after themselves, when those things have already been done before. https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

Surprisingly, the article seems to be written by a smart mathematician, not a crackpot or a social scientist. [1] This kinda reminds me of that medical researcher who rediscovered trapezoid rule in 1994, and called it "Tai's Model". [2] To be fair, this is slightly better as it is supposed to be pedagogical, but it is still quite dishonest to pretend that it is new. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po-Shen_Loh [2]: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove… (It's 459 citations now according to Google Scholar, btw :-))

I think this will entertain you: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

Not to mention that sometimes experts in their fields miss common knowledge in other areas. Like the biologist that reinvented integration, Riemann sum - http://care.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/2/152 (https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

Made me think of: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove… Discussed here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscovery-of-calcu…

There is also this paper (which I may have gotten from a Hacker News post in the past): Tsai, A Mathematical Model for the Determination of Total Area Under Glucose Tolerance and Other Metabolic Curves, Diabetes Care 1994 Feb; 17(2): 152-154. [1] Related blog post: "Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations" [2] [1] http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract [2] https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

It was not invented yet, the "Mathematical Model for the Determination of Total Area Under Glucose Tolerance and Other Metabolic Curves" paper came out in 1994... https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

I particularly enjoy the re-discovery of numerical integration in 1994 by a medical researcher: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

Tell that to tens of thousands of researchers. Heck, even integration has been re-discovered and published: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove… If the tool doesn't work correctly by default. Then it's likely the wrong tool for the job. The default conversions are fine for 99% of use-cases. But no one should mistake Excel for a robust data analysis tool.

At least they didn't "rediscover" Fourier transforms for audio analysis, in the vein of https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

One (not so charitable, I have to admit) interpretation is that there is a sizable group of people interested in ML that doesn't have the more traditional computer science background, and thus find this kind of text far more appealing, xkcd's ten thousand and everything [0]. A more extreme version of this is situation is of the medical researcher who "reinvented" on his own the trapezoidal rule for numerical integration[1]. [0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/ [1]: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

At least they don't rediscover calculus and get citations for it. https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

Medical researcher rediscovers integration, gets 75 citations https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

> (I think I saw a medical paper where they reinvented some basic CS concept :) Perhaps more shocking: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discove…

There was an example not so long ago of a paper published in, I think, biology, where the author had invented a wonderful new technique for more accurate estimates of the area under a curve. It was Simpson's rule. CORRECTION: It was worse than that. It was the trapezoidal rule: http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract The author named it after themselves: ... The Tai model allows flexibility in experimental conditions ... and got 75 citations ... http://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discover… Unbelievable.