After a series of minor adventures (and some grumbling disagreement with Robert over aspects of a need-based aid form, in which I capitulated from realizing my boredom with the whole thing was probably making me dumb), this evening I submitted 3 of the 7 online applications. 3 of the others I am either waiting on emails to be answered by university staff members or need an online recommendation finished. The 7th one I am not going to submit for a couple of months, since it's my back-up school.
I started getting the various supplemental documentation that has to be mailed in to the schools together, but kept running into stupid problems (screwy jump drives, pens running out of ink, printer cartridges running out of ink, photocopies I need to make) and gave up on it for the weekend just now. Tomorrow I have already dedicated to other projects (my weekly major tread, differential equations, housework), so I will get back on this stuff Monday or Tuesday. I still have a lot of time, objectively speaking, but just want to be done.
Have I mentioned that I am on Day 6 of a tension headache that has me walking around feeling like I've been hit on the back of the head with a club? Fortunately, the intensity is varying from minor to nausea-inducing with an average around painful enough to feel pouty and grumpy and generally pissed that I can't take any headache medication that would do any good but still mostly functional.
This entire grad school application process is feeling ultimately unsatisfying. I had thought that finishing things up would make me feel relieved and happy, but mostly, it's like "I have been working on it for an eon and all I have to show for it is this?" Every little aspect of the process has been ungodly time-consuming and the final product seems unimpressive. I am hoping that this is because I am, by this point, so utterly familiar with my CV, statements of purpose, assistantship essays, GRE scores, coursework record, publications, selection of programs that have an excellent research match, etc., that I can no longer see that I have assembled an awesome package of credentials that will make the adcoms say "Daaaaamn."
Hmmm....working on a long, tedious academic project with a thousand little bureaucratic requirements that in the end, you have difficulty bringing yourself to care about anymore, even to celebrate its completion - this does sound like good preparation for graduate school. Doesn't every grad student feel this way about their thesis / dissertation?
Perhaps I will start feeling more excited about this whole thing after: (1) my headache recedes, (2) there is no longer part of my brain sending out excitement-dampening waves due to the need to retain exceedingly boring information about mass-spring systems and series circuits, (3) I have all these applications truly, totally completed, and (4) Ed McMahon's minion shows up at the door with the (Relatively) Big Check.
At least I am not like some people posting on the LiveJournal grad application forum who are freaking out over the fact that they have Dec 1 deadlines but don't have their statement of purpose, letters of recommendation, writing sample, etc., ready to go yet. I definitely prefer dull and bored to vibrating-into-other-dimensions from anxiety and fear.
I will wait for the anxiety to kick in as I wait to hear from the programs.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Science Meets Dance
Tam sends this link featuring videos put together by scientists attempting to interpret their PhD research in dance form.
I have to admit, the dances were much more accessible than anything else with a title like "Resolving Pathways of Functional Coupling in Human Hemoglobin Using Quantitative Low Temperature Isoelectric Focusing of Asymmetric Mutant Hybrids" could possibly be.
I have to admit, the dances were much more accessible than anything else with a title like "Resolving Pathways of Functional Coupling in Human Hemoglobin Using Quantitative Low Temperature Isoelectric Focusing of Asymmetric Mutant Hybrids" could possibly be.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Sock Puppet Bailout
It's one thing to bail out the organizations that our entire economic system depends on to function. But GM? This company has been failing for a long time. They've been talking about the potential for bankruptcy for years. GM's not just caught up in the liquidity crisis. It's an "our products suck, we are not responsive to consumer demand, and we have been overpaying labor for way too long" sort of problem.
I liked this video on a bailout that has received somewhat less media attention:
Of course, if he were a bunny puppet, I simply couldn't deny him the $25 billion.
(via Megan McArdle)
I liked this video on a bailout that has received somewhat less media attention:
Of course, if he were a bunny puppet, I simply couldn't deny him the $25 billion.
(via Megan McArdle)
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Looking Ahead
UPDATE: I have all of my recommendation letters now. I am really relieved to have that part done with! (Actually, one prof still needs to complete an online one, but I feel confident she'll get it done this week.)
Yesterday I picked up the recommendation letters from Professor #2, and I will pick up the last batch from Professor #3 this afternoon. She should also have comments on my statement of purpose (SOP). Somehow, I have almost reached the end of this grad school application process. The hard part is over. I hope this weekend to finish the online applications, finalize the SOPs for the various programs, get my other supporting materials (C.V., etc.) together, and mail off my packets to 6 programs. (I have one additional program with a late application deadline that I will put together later if I haven't heard from one of the more-preferred programs already.)
Last "weekend" (Thurs - Sun), because I was at a standstill with these masters program applications, I turned my attention again to PhD programs and a little bit beyond. I have a list of 40-odd marketing programs I am working with. I had already put together information on research fit with professors in these programs.
Another piece of the puzzle is program quality. Unlike MBA programs (or psychology PhD programs) there is no standard ranking list of marketing PhD programs. However, there are several sources of rankings based on faculty publications, with programs having a greater number of publications, and publications in more prestigious journals, given a higher rank. These rankings cover different time periods (e.g. based on consumer psychology publications from the 1990s, based on general marketing publications from 2001) and give a sort of mixed result. For instance, UT-Austin is a top 10 program by some of these lists, but comes in at #66 using another one. So it's not entirely clear to me how to weight these rankings, though I suspect I will be able to generally place them in tiers such as Top 10, Top 30, Top 50, etc. Other programs have strengths in niche areas. For instance, I know (from reading it in a thousand places) that the University of Florida is a very top program in consumer behavior, though their overall marketing or business school rank is lower.
A very important aspect of a program's quality is its placement record: where do graduates of the program get their first academic job? Depending on whether you are interested in getting a position with the highest-ranked program you can, a job at a research-oriented university, a teaching college, or heaven-forfend industry, you need to be more or less selective about the PhD program you attend. Programs often mention placement on their web sites, but this is usually a selective list, in which they cherry-pick the best placements and say things like "In recent years, our graduates have found positions in excellent universities such as X College, Y University" etc., with the emphasis on "such as."
I happened across a thread on the Business Week forums from 2004-2007 that included over 6500 posts (!) from various business PhD applicants, students, and a handful of professors, that took forever to read but did have some interesting information and perspectives that got me thinking about several things:
1. The Great Age Debate
Most of the applicants on the forum were trying to get into top tier (top 10 or perhaps top 20) business PhD programs. There was a lot of furious debate over to what extent top programs prefer younger over older students. There was a consensus that for top programs, being as ancient as 30 is a serious disadvantage and being over 35 will hugely reduce your chances at getting in (and your chances are pretty bad to begin with, given the strong competition for a very few slots). While this was felt to be more significant the more math-oriented the field (e.g. finance being very mathy and strategy being less so), it's a concern for all fields.
Of course, I am already very familiar with the age discrimination of other academic (vs. professional) programs, but had thought that this was less of a factor in business schools. But it would make sense that the top business programs would function a lot like their counterparts in economics, psychology, etc., since they tend to prefer students with undergrad credentials in one of the foundational academic subjects from the elite universities.
It's a bit hard, though, to say whether fewer older applicants are admitted to these programs due to age discrimination (or a preference for younger students among faculty) or at least in part because older applicants tend to be less competitive on dimensions that matter.
Since my age is the aspect of my application that I have the least control over, there is a limit to how useful this information is, but I do think it's helpful in targetting programs to realize that I may have an even tougher time getting admitted to certain places, especially the Stanford, Cornell, Northwestern type programs. Whether ultimately this will influence me to avoid certain programs, or only impact my expectations of success, I don't know. It does suggest that looking at the ages of current students might help identify programs that indicate a willingness to admit (exceptionally qualified) older applicants vs. a tendency to prefer fresh 22-year-old Ivy League undergrads. It also means that I should probably be especially careful to apply to a wide range of schools, since the age issue is less problematic the farther down the rankings you go.
2. The MBA Question
This brings up another controversial question they discussed - whether applicants with MBAs are seen as less desirable. I had noted before that students with MBAs were a lot more common among the mid-tier and lower programs than the very top ones. The commenters mostly felt that masters degrees in academic disciplines (math, stat, econ, psych, engineering, etc.) were more valuable than an MBA, which is a professional degree and not a "rigorous" program. This is in line with what I had already decided for myself.
3. The Placement Issue
As I've discussed before, the outlook for academic jobs amongst business PhDs is very good compared to most other disciplines. But this doesn't mean that graduating from a top 20 program guarantees you a job at another top 20 institution. There is the same "downward movement" in placement that you see elsewhere, only not as severe. Plenty of graduates of Wharton (the very best business school in the world) end up at less-than-elite universities. And apparently, some top schools are utterly notorious for making tenure nearly impossible to get. One school (Harvard?) was mentioned as granting tenure to only 1 of 7 people, so a lot of people work their asses off on research for the first 6 years and still end up moving down to a much lower school. Current professors talked about people they knew who were placed in a less highly-ranked program to begin with getting tenure easier and with less stress. People talked about how surprised they were to find that the status game, as played out by comparing who is at a better school than someone else, who is at what rank in the program, etc., is so much more important in academia than in industry. (This makes sense, though; in industry, people can feel superior through really high earning power, but the difference between the top paid and lowest paid professors is not very large, leaving prestige as the main way to differentiate yourself from others.)
The comments on this subject really got me thinking about what level of placement I would consider "good enough" or even preferable to getting a job at a top 20 program. I am fortunate that I actually just want to be a college professor, unlike some of the applicants who are only interested in doing it if they can get an elite academic job. I am not thinking about giving up the possibility of becoming a powerful, insanely-well-paid businessman or whatever by taking the academic route because I have no interest in the kind of career that getting a Harvard MBA instead of a PhD could make possible for me. I am not motivated by the desire to be a professor at Wharton so I can feel like a major hot-shot and be well-connected for lucrative consulting opportunities that arise. I just like the idea of getting paid to do something I really like doing.
Although I am sort of an academic snob, I basically view getting a PhD and then an academic job at any kind of decent university as pretty elite. And I'm not at all motivated to do something so that my grandmother can impress her friends at church by saying that I'm at Harvard or whatever.
And it does sound like life at the top of this academic food chain is really hard. You may not be teaching a lot of classes at Northwestern, but the expectations in terms of publication productivity is kind of insane. I might be happier at a more middle-of-the-road institution that puts a little bit less overwhelming publication pressure. (The publication pressure at any research-oriented university is going to be hard enough.)
While this doesn't necessarily mean I'd turn down the chance to attend a top program or get a job at a great university, it is sort of reassuring to realize that there is a pretty good range of outcomes that I would find satisfying - especially given that the probabilities are a lot higher for getting a job at the University of Georgia than the University of Chicago.
Yesterday I picked up the recommendation letters from Professor #2, and I will pick up the last batch from Professor #3 this afternoon. She should also have comments on my statement of purpose (SOP). Somehow, I have almost reached the end of this grad school application process. The hard part is over. I hope this weekend to finish the online applications, finalize the SOPs for the various programs, get my other supporting materials (C.V., etc.) together, and mail off my packets to 6 programs. (I have one additional program with a late application deadline that I will put together later if I haven't heard from one of the more-preferred programs already.)
Last "weekend" (Thurs - Sun), because I was at a standstill with these masters program applications, I turned my attention again to PhD programs and a little bit beyond. I have a list of 40-odd marketing programs I am working with. I had already put together information on research fit with professors in these programs.
Another piece of the puzzle is program quality. Unlike MBA programs (or psychology PhD programs) there is no standard ranking list of marketing PhD programs. However, there are several sources of rankings based on faculty publications, with programs having a greater number of publications, and publications in more prestigious journals, given a higher rank. These rankings cover different time periods (e.g. based on consumer psychology publications from the 1990s, based on general marketing publications from 2001) and give a sort of mixed result. For instance, UT-Austin is a top 10 program by some of these lists, but comes in at #66 using another one. So it's not entirely clear to me how to weight these rankings, though I suspect I will be able to generally place them in tiers such as Top 10, Top 30, Top 50, etc. Other programs have strengths in niche areas. For instance, I know (from reading it in a thousand places) that the University of Florida is a very top program in consumer behavior, though their overall marketing or business school rank is lower.
A very important aspect of a program's quality is its placement record: where do graduates of the program get their first academic job? Depending on whether you are interested in getting a position with the highest-ranked program you can, a job at a research-oriented university, a teaching college, or heaven-forfend industry, you need to be more or less selective about the PhD program you attend. Programs often mention placement on their web sites, but this is usually a selective list, in which they cherry-pick the best placements and say things like "In recent years, our graduates have found positions in excellent universities such as X College, Y University" etc., with the emphasis on "such as."
I happened across a thread on the Business Week forums from 2004-2007 that included over 6500 posts (!) from various business PhD applicants, students, and a handful of professors, that took forever to read but did have some interesting information and perspectives that got me thinking about several things:
1. The Great Age Debate
Most of the applicants on the forum were trying to get into top tier (top 10 or perhaps top 20) business PhD programs. There was a lot of furious debate over to what extent top programs prefer younger over older students. There was a consensus that for top programs, being as ancient as 30 is a serious disadvantage and being over 35 will hugely reduce your chances at getting in (and your chances are pretty bad to begin with, given the strong competition for a very few slots). While this was felt to be more significant the more math-oriented the field (e.g. finance being very mathy and strategy being less so), it's a concern for all fields.
Of course, I am already very familiar with the age discrimination of other academic (vs. professional) programs, but had thought that this was less of a factor in business schools. But it would make sense that the top business programs would function a lot like their counterparts in economics, psychology, etc., since they tend to prefer students with undergrad credentials in one of the foundational academic subjects from the elite universities.
It's a bit hard, though, to say whether fewer older applicants are admitted to these programs due to age discrimination (or a preference for younger students among faculty) or at least in part because older applicants tend to be less competitive on dimensions that matter.
Since my age is the aspect of my application that I have the least control over, there is a limit to how useful this information is, but I do think it's helpful in targetting programs to realize that I may have an even tougher time getting admitted to certain places, especially the Stanford, Cornell, Northwestern type programs. Whether ultimately this will influence me to avoid certain programs, or only impact my expectations of success, I don't know. It does suggest that looking at the ages of current students might help identify programs that indicate a willingness to admit (exceptionally qualified) older applicants vs. a tendency to prefer fresh 22-year-old Ivy League undergrads. It also means that I should probably be especially careful to apply to a wide range of schools, since the age issue is less problematic the farther down the rankings you go.
2. The MBA Question
This brings up another controversial question they discussed - whether applicants with MBAs are seen as less desirable. I had noted before that students with MBAs were a lot more common among the mid-tier and lower programs than the very top ones. The commenters mostly felt that masters degrees in academic disciplines (math, stat, econ, psych, engineering, etc.) were more valuable than an MBA, which is a professional degree and not a "rigorous" program. This is in line with what I had already decided for myself.
3. The Placement Issue
As I've discussed before, the outlook for academic jobs amongst business PhDs is very good compared to most other disciplines. But this doesn't mean that graduating from a top 20 program guarantees you a job at another top 20 institution. There is the same "downward movement" in placement that you see elsewhere, only not as severe. Plenty of graduates of Wharton (the very best business school in the world) end up at less-than-elite universities. And apparently, some top schools are utterly notorious for making tenure nearly impossible to get. One school (Harvard?) was mentioned as granting tenure to only 1 of 7 people, so a lot of people work their asses off on research for the first 6 years and still end up moving down to a much lower school. Current professors talked about people they knew who were placed in a less highly-ranked program to begin with getting tenure easier and with less stress. People talked about how surprised they were to find that the status game, as played out by comparing who is at a better school than someone else, who is at what rank in the program, etc., is so much more important in academia than in industry. (This makes sense, though; in industry, people can feel superior through really high earning power, but the difference between the top paid and lowest paid professors is not very large, leaving prestige as the main way to differentiate yourself from others.)
The comments on this subject really got me thinking about what level of placement I would consider "good enough" or even preferable to getting a job at a top 20 program. I am fortunate that I actually just want to be a college professor, unlike some of the applicants who are only interested in doing it if they can get an elite academic job. I am not thinking about giving up the possibility of becoming a powerful, insanely-well-paid businessman or whatever by taking the academic route because I have no interest in the kind of career that getting a Harvard MBA instead of a PhD could make possible for me. I am not motivated by the desire to be a professor at Wharton so I can feel like a major hot-shot and be well-connected for lucrative consulting opportunities that arise. I just like the idea of getting paid to do something I really like doing.
Although I am sort of an academic snob, I basically view getting a PhD and then an academic job at any kind of decent university as pretty elite. And I'm not at all motivated to do something so that my grandmother can impress her friends at church by saying that I'm at Harvard or whatever.
And it does sound like life at the top of this academic food chain is really hard. You may not be teaching a lot of classes at Northwestern, but the expectations in terms of publication productivity is kind of insane. I might be happier at a more middle-of-the-road institution that puts a little bit less overwhelming publication pressure. (The publication pressure at any research-oriented university is going to be hard enough.)
While this doesn't necessarily mean I'd turn down the chance to attend a top program or get a job at a great university, it is sort of reassuring to realize that there is a pretty good range of outcomes that I would find satisfying - especially given that the probabilities are a lot higher for getting a job at the University of Georgia than the University of Chicago.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
A Solid Foundation, Revisited
As an example of what is implied when people get nostalgic over the way math "used" to be taught, before all this crazy New Math and so forth, when kids learned the "basics" and didn't futz around with silly theory that nobody understands, etc., and got a "solid foundation" in facts, and walked up hill to school both ways in the snow with no shoes -- both of my parents learned to multiply using the multiplication table without being told that multiplication represented a short cut for repeated addition. I have no idea how common this was, but I thought it interesting that it was true for both of them, who attended school in different states.
You know, I agree that it's a useful skill to quickly and accurately come up with the fact that 8 x 9 = 72. Less useful than it was in the pre-calculator/pre-Excel/pre-etc. era, but still useful. Of course, it seems to me awfully useful to know why 8 x 9 = 72 also. I mean, isn't memorizing the multiplication table a lot easier when you realize that 8 x 9 = 2 x 4 x 9 and that 8 x 9 = 8 x 8 plus another 8? When I was learning my table, there were times I couldn't quite remember this particular number (I knew it was something in the range of 71 - 74) but I was able to figure it out again on the fly because I did know that 4 x 9 = 36 and I knew how to double that number. I also knew that 8 x 8 = 64 and could add 8 to that if I forgot 4 x 9 during the same brain freeze. I had a lot of different ways to approach the problem.
I don't see how it's to any kid's advantage to learn that 8 x 9 = 72 in the same way that they learn that "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." It gives the impression that all these numbers are what they are through some mysterious process or accident of history while in reality, there's a lot of sense to it. And in my opinion, it is (I hesitate to use this word, but I think it fits) empowering to realize that you are dealing with a sensible system in which things can be figured out using rational thinking. Once you learn why 8 x 9 = 72, you can figure out what is 16 x 9 pretty easily, and 16 x 27, and well, a whole lot of numbers, without ever having to be told by someone else or memorizing a bunch of things.
I don't mean to imply that every person who talks about "solid foundation" really wants to return to an era when children did not know what multiplication means. But I wonder how many people (and here I mean normal people in the general population who are reactant against all stripes of innovative "New Math"-esque curriculum, not math educators who are arguing about these issues at a much higher level and with a lot more knowledge than the rest of us have and who would rightly view my comments as knocking down a strawman in terms of where the informed debate is occuring) who yearn for that supposedly wonderful pre-New Math time realize/remember quite how fact (and not theory) focused the instruction really was. Perhaps some of them would not even recognize the idea of multiplication as repeated addition to even be "theory" now that it's so commonly taught.
I was lucky to learn this stuff during the post-New Math era and to have a dad who thought it was fun to teach me algebra when I was quite young. (He also bought me and worked with me on geology sets, chemistry sets, and electricity sets. The fact that I did not grow up to be a scientist or engineer is not through any lack of exposure, sexist or otherwise. I joke to my younger sister the applied math and computer science major that where math, science, and computers are concerned, I peaked early.)
You know, I agree that it's a useful skill to quickly and accurately come up with the fact that 8 x 9 = 72. Less useful than it was in the pre-calculator/pre-Excel/pre-etc. era, but still useful. Of course, it seems to me awfully useful to know why 8 x 9 = 72 also. I mean, isn't memorizing the multiplication table a lot easier when you realize that 8 x 9 = 2 x 4 x 9 and that 8 x 9 = 8 x 8 plus another 8? When I was learning my table, there were times I couldn't quite remember this particular number (I knew it was something in the range of 71 - 74) but I was able to figure it out again on the fly because I did know that 4 x 9 = 36 and I knew how to double that number. I also knew that 8 x 8 = 64 and could add 8 to that if I forgot 4 x 9 during the same brain freeze. I had a lot of different ways to approach the problem.
I don't see how it's to any kid's advantage to learn that 8 x 9 = 72 in the same way that they learn that "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." It gives the impression that all these numbers are what they are through some mysterious process or accident of history while in reality, there's a lot of sense to it. And in my opinion, it is (I hesitate to use this word, but I think it fits) empowering to realize that you are dealing with a sensible system in which things can be figured out using rational thinking. Once you learn why 8 x 9 = 72, you can figure out what is 16 x 9 pretty easily, and 16 x 27, and well, a whole lot of numbers, without ever having to be told by someone else or memorizing a bunch of things.
I don't mean to imply that every person who talks about "solid foundation" really wants to return to an era when children did not know what multiplication means. But I wonder how many people (and here I mean normal people in the general population who are reactant against all stripes of innovative "New Math"-esque curriculum, not math educators who are arguing about these issues at a much higher level and with a lot more knowledge than the rest of us have and who would rightly view my comments as knocking down a strawman in terms of where the informed debate is occuring) who yearn for that supposedly wonderful pre-New Math time realize/remember quite how fact (and not theory) focused the instruction really was. Perhaps some of them would not even recognize the idea of multiplication as repeated addition to even be "theory" now that it's so commonly taught.
I was lucky to learn this stuff during the post-New Math era and to have a dad who thought it was fun to teach me algebra when I was quite young. (He also bought me and worked with me on geology sets, chemistry sets, and electricity sets. The fact that I did not grow up to be a scientist or engineer is not through any lack of exposure, sexist or otherwise. I joke to my younger sister the applied math and computer science major that where math, science, and computers are concerned, I peaked early.)
Modern Technology
RB and I were going to a restaurant tonight that I thought I knew where was, but wasn't quite sure (always a dangerous situation with his and my poor sense of direction).
I said, "Oh, do I have my cell phone? ... No."
RB said, "Do you have a web browser on your phone?" (This would be genuinely surprising, given my ancient, frills-free cell phone ways.)
I said, "Of course not. I was going to call Robert and have him look it up."
So I used RB's phone, though the first time, it didn't work because I could not remember my own telephone number. Neither could he, but at least he had it in memory. Robert told us where the restaurant was (and I had two pancakes roughly the size of the tabletop. At least they were full of blueberries, high in antioxidants. Ahem. They also had good regular iced tea and the great decaf herbal "crocodile" tea.)
Robert is my web browser sort of the way that back before the machines existed/were common, "calculators" referred to people who performed mathematical calculations. It's nice the way he responds to semi-incoherent questions in plain English and so forth. I don't know that the artificial intelligence exists that could come even close to matching his performance.
In only semi-related news, I have determined that RB is my "magical technology friend." He has many other content areas in which he is a magical friend, but he is especially strong in all things tech-related. He is the magical computer geek friend for a lot of people, it seems.
I said, "Oh, do I have my cell phone? ... No."
RB said, "Do you have a web browser on your phone?" (This would be genuinely surprising, given my ancient, frills-free cell phone ways.)
I said, "Of course not. I was going to call Robert and have him look it up."
So I used RB's phone, though the first time, it didn't work because I could not remember my own telephone number. Neither could he, but at least he had it in memory. Robert told us where the restaurant was (and I had two pancakes roughly the size of the tabletop. At least they were full of blueberries, high in antioxidants. Ahem. They also had good regular iced tea and the great decaf herbal "crocodile" tea.)
Robert is my web browser sort of the way that back before the machines existed/were common, "calculators" referred to people who performed mathematical calculations. It's nice the way he responds to semi-incoherent questions in plain English and so forth. I don't know that the artificial intelligence exists that could come even close to matching his performance.
In only semi-related news, I have determined that RB is my "magical technology friend." He has many other content areas in which he is a magical friend, but he is especially strong in all things tech-related. He is the magical computer geek friend for a lot of people, it seems.
Quote of the Day: Game Theory Edition
"One of the most difficult challenges of all is rooted in the very origins of game theory: it was developed by men of nearly superhuman intellect like Nash and von Neumann. That is both its great strength and its great weakness, because for game theory to be successful, it must provide insight into what mere mortals will do. Game theory expresses the way people would act as the solution to a mathematical equation. It presumes hyperrational players who are instantly able to solve very tough problems, and this description starts to look unrealistic if game theory is to be a practical tool for explaining how real people actually behave. Nash and von Neumann really could solve such problems instantly. The rest of us cannot."
-Tim Hartford, The Undercover Economist, 2006
You'll remember John Nash from the movie "A Beautiful Mind."
Hartford points out that a great many people thought John von Neumann the most brilliant person alive, and since he worked at Princeton with Albert Einstein, that's saying something.
-Tim Hartford, The Undercover Economist, 2006
You'll remember John Nash from the movie "A Beautiful Mind."
Hartford points out that a great many people thought John von Neumann the most brilliant person alive, and since he worked at Princeton with Albert Einstein, that's saying something.
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