University should focus on inspiring and not on evaluating Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
As of 2020s and much earlier, Ciro Santilli believes that undergrad studies were fundamentally broken (considering the Information Age which completely changed what would be possible) because university had only two goals, with the exception of a few enlightened professors:As a result, most students, who would not go on to do a PhD essentially do a simple trade: all their time, and possibly some money, in exchange for embuing themselves with the incredible name of a respected institution so they can get better jobs later on.
- rank students from worse to best so they can get into PhD programs.For regular jobs grades didn't even matter as much compared the prestige of your university (and therefore, university entry exam grades) and your ability to stand the stress of exams to get minimal passing grade.In particular, being able to rank requires setting the difficulty level at a point where you can see a Normal distribution in grades, and not have everyone at either 0 nor 100%.Also, this split could be caused by either shitty learning materials/conditions, or by mere volume. It doesn't matter.
- get money from the students. Of course, in countries where university is "free", this means reporting how many students you had to some government office so they can give you a corresponding budget. But you still have an incentive to enroll as many as possible.
Beauty, deep understanding, and learning awesome things comes basically as a second thought.
1925 by Charles Kay Ogden.
TODO understand more intuitively how that determines if a reaction happens or not.
At least from the formula we see that:
- the more exothermic, the more likely it is to occur
- if the entropy increases, the higher the temperature, the more likely it is to occur
- otherwise, the lower the temperature the more likely it is to occur
A prototypical example of reaction that is exothermic but does not happen at any temperature is combustion.
Unsurprisingly the term "computer" became a synonym for this from the 1960s onwards!
Number of elements of an elliptic curve over the rational numbers Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
Can be finite or infinite! TODO examples. But it is always a finitely generated group.
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