the 'aftermath' :D

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Reply 20

delllboy

'the best laid plans of mice and men, gang aft agly' or something :P

Reply 21

Simplicity

delllboy

'the best laid plans of mice and men, gang aft agly' or something :P

I knew someone would quote of mice and men. But, not really. I mean more like a plan would suffer from chaos theory so would be chaotic.

Reply 22

MrShifty

Simplicity

I knew someone would quote of mice and men.

Ahhh gee George, that's ain't offa no o' Mice n' Men, itsa Robert Burns 'To a Mouse'. Its good to be a mo' well a read sometimes, George.

(Sorry, any excuse to do Lenny impressions and all that).

Reply 23

delllboy

MrShifty

Ahhh gee George, that's ain't offa no o' Mice n' Men, itsa Robert Burns 'To a Mouse'. Its good to be a mo' well a read sometimes, George.

(Sorry, any excuse to do Lenny impressions and all that).

lol jokes aside, am i right in thinking physics degree would be similar to maths? i find the subjects very closely related and i find physics easier than maths. both im predicted A*.

Reply 24

MrShifty

Not really, a physics and a maths degree are very different things. A maths degree is very much more focused on mathematics as an abstract construction worthy of study for itself, whereas in Physics its much more of a tool to be applied and a method of describing the objects you're actually studying. I know this all sounds very vague and difficult to imagine before you see it for yourself, but rest assured that they are two very different subjects. Even if you focused on applied mathematics, it would still very much be about the mathematics itself more than anything else.

Reply 25

Simplicity

MrShifty

Is that true? as I have heard a few physicist be called applied mathematician. For example, Hawkings is called an applied mathematician on wikipedia. Also, Edward Witten did win a field medal and he is physicist.

Reply 26

MrShifty

Simplicity

Aye, but the thing to remember about people making contributions across disciplines is that their achievements come years after their undergraduate degree, in which time they've had time and a good reason to learn what they need to know to work in this or that field. After pursuing an applied maths degree you may know an awful lot about modelling and bits and bobs about special relativity/cosmology/quantum mechanics and so forth, but you're not going to have the same breadth of knowledge available to someone who's done a physics degree. Similarly, a physicist may have knowledge of some group and Lie theory, but only in a fairly narrow sense that concentrates mainly on what's most important in relation to their own field. For instance, I have a couple of textbooks on representation theory for graduate students: one's intended primarily for chemists and the other for mathematicians and they're very different books indeed!

Of course, you can move between the two. It's possible for a mathematician to do a PhD that concentrates on theoretical physics, and I imagine the opposite is also true, and there are a lot of postgrad masters a person can take to ease the transition if need be, but they will typically have to work at filling in the gaps in their knowledge (having said that, the same is true for anyone going to research in general as well).

Reply 27

Simplicity

MrShifty

I was under the impression that you go into a narrow field and you just like learn more of it, specialization. I thought that was the point of a PhD, so you can move into a particular field. What if you do pure maths or logic? what skills do you have then?

Can you? As I though you needed to do a mathematical physics degree to do it. I read that you sort of have to make up your mind if you going to be a logitician, pure mathematician, applied mathematician or mathematical physicist at your fourth year at undergrad.

Reply 28

MrShifty

Simplicity

I was under the impression that you go into a narrow field and you just like learn more of it, specialization. I thought that was the point of a PhD, so you can move into a particular field.

You're right, a PhD is about specialization and taken in one particular field, but you still need to get the background necessary to undertake that kind of study. There is a significant gap between a mathematics degree and the current state of research, and a significant amount of the first year is spent playing catch up and trying to fill that gap. As a result you'll often find students (and indeed academics) brushing up on a fairly broad swathe of topics that might prove useful to their work.

I read that you sort of have to make up your mind if you going to be a logitician, pure mathematician, applied mathematician or mathematical physicist at your fourth year at undergrad.

Yes and no. You do have to choose what area you're going to do your PhD in during the late third/early fourth year of a degree, and typically what you end up doing is going to be influenced by what you've studied (although I would have thought it possible that an applied mathmo who's chosen a good mix of the more physicsy modules could make the transition to a research degree in mathematical physics or the like). However, that doesn't necessarly mean that your career will be spent entirely in that field; your research may take you in all manner of directions, depending on its applications and your interests. The point being that physics and maths are both very different degrees, but over the course of an entire career it is sometimes possible to move between the two to a greater or lesser degree.

The reason this is possible is because, as you'd expect, there are a number of problems that straddle both mathematical physics and mathematics (and not necessarily just applied) and so are of interest to both kinds of researcher. The Quantum Inverse Scattering method, for instance is very much a part of physics, but through the study of it and related topics Quantum Groups were discovered, which are of interest to both physicists and pure mathematicians, and which in turn led to the discovery of things called Crystal Bases which are lovely combinatorial objects and very much of interest to pure mathmos studying the representation theory of certain algebras. I know I'm littering this reply with a fair amount of impenetrable jargon, but what I hope this illustrates is that there are 'cross-over points' where it is possible for a mathematician, or indeed a theoretical physicist to contribute to the other's field and, if they're sufficiently motivated to even move entirely into a new field.