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hbghlyj

stackexchange.com/leagues/69/year/math/2024-0 … reputationchange#232
Qiaochu Yuan
member for: 14 years, 3 months
#1 year rank
这是他的数学博客：qchu.wordpress.com/
Twitter：twitter.com/QiaochuYuan

曾是加州大学伯克利分校纯数学专业的博士生；现在是一名情感教练gobeyondgoals.com/qiaochu-yuan/

乍一看很奇怪

hbghlyj

XJMR论坛 "数学天才"长篇讨论帖 第 5 页
He used to be really smart guy at MIT. What happened?

I believe Qiaochu Yuan dropped out.

He fell in with the wrong crowd (SFBA “rationalists”), now he’s a life coach or something

QY quit in his 6th year of PhD. Many young prodigies go through the same process: In high school they are the sole superstar of their cohort. In college, they are stars with many equals. In a math PhD program where top talents in the world converge, they are just another good student and not competitive. So, they "lost interest".

hbghlyj

@QiaochuYuan 在Quora上的回答：

One day I woke up as if from a dream, and the following thought hit me: even if I solved my thesis problem, maybe 4 people in the world would be prepared to understand what I had done, let alone care about it.

And I asked myself, “is this what I want to spend my life doing? My short, precious life on this planet, which is filled with so much pain but also so much love, and which I have only begun to explore and understand?”

And I found that my answer was no.

Seems like he got depressed about his lackluster dating life and it probably made him not care about math anymore based on his tweets from a while back (twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1224750631358889984). But honestly I'd have to agree that it's not worth being a top mathematician if it means you have to be single for the rest of your life.

hbghlyj

Qiaochu Yuan made the mistake of not finishing PhD. At least he could have used the degree as a positive signal to help secure a job. Worse, he burned the bridges by blogging about disillusion with math research. Industry would also be reluctant to hire him as a quant, seeing that he is flakey by his own revelation.

What QY could have done is to negotiate with advisor to reduce the scope and difficulty of the PhD project. Most professors would be willing to compromise just to send an underperformed 6th-year PhD student out of the door, place him in industry and move on.

一位网友说，他本可以和导师协商，减少博士课题的范围和难度，而不是退学。

业余的业余

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