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An American Physics Student in England
Personal blog · fliptomato.wordpress.comsciencemath
An American Physics Student in England is a personal blog at fliptomato.wordpress.com about science and math. Since 2010, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times, most often “Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)”. The last post was in 2008, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (27) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Blog post about a medical researcher who rediscovered numerical integration (the trapezoidal rule) in a 1994 diabetes paper and got citations for it. HN commenters cite it as a recurring example of reinvented ideas.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 27 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)28 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2013-02-22
- Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-12-03
What Hacker News says?
Right, the other side is when you end up with rediscoveries of the same ideas. The example that comes to my mind is when a medical researcher found the trapezoidal rule for integration again[1]. [1]: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster”Submitted Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations as a story · 319 points
HN discussionTell that to tens of thousands of researchers. Heck, even integration has been re-discovered and published: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research... If the tool doesn't work correctly by default . Then it's likely the wrong tool for the job. The default conversions are fine for 99% of use-cases. But no one should mistake Excel for a robust data analysis tool.
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs”Submitted Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007) as a story · 176 points
HN discussionSlightly relevant classic: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Giant, free index to world's research papers released online”Submitted Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007) as a story · 78 points
HN discussionFirst up, I am no expert, but I have traveled this road for a while so I'll share a bit. I see Susskind's theoretical minimum is plugged here. Good. That is a fantastic place to start. Start at the beginning. Skip nothing. Leverage what you know against what you don't. You remember how to find an extremum of a function from Cal 1? The first order necessary condition for an extreme point is that the derivative of the…
Comment linking /2006/12/30/from-griffiths-to-peskin-a-lit-review-for-beginners/
on “Ask HN: How do I learn math/physics in my thirties?”Submitted Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPafnuty Chebyshev, a Russian mathematician who discovered a bunch of important things, deliberately limited his intake of other mathematicians' works, in order to force himself think in original ways, not ways suggested by others' works. This medicine needs to be taken in moderation though, else one can end up reinventing some key wheels instead of speeding forward on these wheels, like https://fliptomato.wordpress.…
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “AI is killing the web – can anything save it?”Submitted Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt was not invented yet, the "Mathematical Model for the Determination of Total Area Under Glucose Tolerance and Other Metabolic Curves" paper came out in 1994... https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer”Submitted Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNot to mention that sometimes experts in their fields miss common knowledge in other areas. Like the biologist that reinvented integration, Riemann sum - http://care.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/2/1... ( https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research... ).
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong”Submitted Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSomething else less related that I find really useful about these chatbots is their ability to take some abstract explanation of some problem/attempts to tackle it, and it'll often spit out a name for it, and explain that this sort of problem is already well studied. That can be really difficult with other more traditional tools. I feel like this could be a big deal in science in general. People of different fields…
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “AI copilots are changing how coding is taught”I'd like to discourage people from naming things after themselves, when those things have already been done before. https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Possibly a new way of drawing boxes in the terminal”I particularly enjoy the re-discovery of numerical integration in 1994 by a medical researcher: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Death of the sampling theorem?”> (I think I saw a medical paper where they reinvented some basic CS concept :) Perhaps more shocking: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Domain Knowledge or a Lack Thereof”One (not so charitable, I have to admit) interpretation is that there is a sizable group of people interested in ML that doesn't have the more traditional computer science background, and thus find this kind of text far more appealing, xkcd's ten thousand and everything [0]. A more extreme version of this is situation is of the medical researcher who "reinvented" on his own the trapezoidal rule for numerical integra…
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “High performance models in TensorFlow”Do you know the medical doctor who published a mathematical method (named after herself) to compute the area under a curve? Truly revolutionary! https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Shit My Reviewers Say”> there's other pretty important stuff that can still bubble up, like the person reinventing the wheel where a well known library could have been used I wouldn't call not using a well known library "reinventing the wheel". The wheel in that expression is a concept, not a implementation. A library is an implementation of a concept. Writing yourself code instead of using a library is a great way to learn about what th…
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Resumes are dangerous?”There was an example not so long ago of a paper published in, I think, biology, where the author had invented a wonderful new technique for more accurate estimates of the area under a curve. It was Simpson's rule. CORRECTION: It was worse than that. It was the trapezoidal rule: http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract The author named it after themselves: ... The Tai model allows flexibility in exp…
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “How to Read Mathematics”Surprisingly, the article seems to be written by a smart mathematician, not a crackpot or a social scientist. [1] This kinda reminds me of that medical researcher who rediscovered trapezoid rule in 1994, and called it "Tai's Model". [2] To be fair, this is slightly better as it is supposed to be pedagogical, but it is still quite dishonest to pretend that it is new. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po-Shen_Loh [2]…
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “A new way to make quadratic equations easy (2019)”I think this will entertain you: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?”People often know about Isaac Newton but not Isaac Barrow. Or the greatest of all, the doctor that rediscovered integration in 1994. https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “The Birth of Calculus (1986) [video]”Medical researcher rediscovers integration, gets 75 citations https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “The GRIM test – a method for evaluating published research”Made me think of: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research... Discussed here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “It’s impossible to see the world as it is, argues a neuroscientist [video]”Absolutely. So wouldn't it be neat if premedical students and business majors had already seen a thorough stats class in high school, so that their college-level stats classes could spend less time on the basics and more time on those subtleties? (Speaking as someone who's taught calculus-based physics to premedical students, I think it's important to recognize that most folks who've taken a year of calculus really…
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Is Algebra Necessary?”At least they don't rediscover calculus and get citations for it. https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Why Don't Computer Scientists Learn Math? (2016)”Perhaps you haven't heard about the doctor who rediscovered the trapezoid rule and had his article published in a respected, peer reviewed biology journal in 1994.[1] The paper is called "A mathematical model for the determination of total area under glucose tolerance and other metabolic curves" — and it got 75 citations (as of 2007). EDIT: Google Scholar lists 178 citations now [‽]. The abstract: "OBJECTIVE To deve…
Comment linking /2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/
on “Great Scientist ≠ Good at Math”
