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by vouaobrasil 328 days ago
> Not sure why you added "but even so"

Because the "even so" was for the "self-motivated" part, not the "getting the PhD" part.

> I've learned enough to publish (well received) technical books in areas I've never taken a single course in,

I'm talking about pure math here, not other technical fields which are more hands on and don't require as much mentorship. Programming is easier to self-learn than math for sure, because it is not very abstract compared to math. It's also guided by whether the code works or not.

1 comments

> I'm talking about pure math here

Well the post is "Mathematics for Computer Science" which I don't think anyone considers "pure math". Most of my writing has been in the area of applied mathematics, the closest I've gotten to pure math would be some stuff on measure theory.

So yea, it might be a challenge to self teach something like cluster algebras, but at that level much of the work in the field is academic communication anyway.