Un-nerd my life
Tags: Scientific community, Social impactPosted in PhD life
He calculates the Fourier-transform of a rational function in his mind. He inverts a 9 by 9 complex valued matrix on the back of an envelope in ten minutes. At the age of 30, He publishes one chapter of a book and 10 articles every year, in 3 of these articles he is a single author. He works 11 hours a day in his room and he is always busy thinking or calculating. He knows the answer to any physical and mathematical question you ask. He must be a genius.
But if you tell such qualifications of our hero scientist to the people who are sunning at the beach or are shopping in the street, if you could ever manage to describe what those qualifications mean and how somebody can attain them, statistically speaking he will be tagged as a nerd.







Readers' comments
Well, you'd hope that the chair(wo)man does the job when someone is about to go over time. If you don't ...
11 Mar 2010 20:56, Mirjam
(I'm typing this comment for the third time now... *sigh*) Many people don't know this, but Google Docs has a built-in ...
9 Mar 2010 23:47, cpbotha
For senior scientists it may be a conscious (although stupid) choice to give a talk to impress people, instead of ...
9 Mar 2010 10:35, Mirjam
What do you mean by 'pointing stick'? Obviously, we don't live in an ideal world, but fortunately most scientists will ...
22 Jan 2010 8:28, Mirjam
What about academia.edu? My impression was that they aspire to become a kind of "Facebook for scientists".
14 Jan 2010 22:32, Researcher