Truly Evil Fiziks Types
By Thoreau
Physics and math majors have the highest LSAT scores. I have often ranted against insisting that every physics major should go to a Ph.D. program, but surely Ph.D. over-production is better than lawyer over-production.
Comment by Joe Strummer —
September 2, 2009 @ 10:24 am
As someone who just graduated and passed the bar, let me say: yes. Too many lawyers.
If you are 18 and thinking about what to do with your college years: science, math, engineering. It doesn’t matter if you’re not a “math” person. Just do it. You’ll have a lifetime to read literature, history and philosophy.
Indeed, if you do find that you really do want to be a lawyer, you will be much better positioned in terms of the law schools you can get into and in terms of the offers you can get out of those law schools. E.g., if you’re a patent law student, you’re going to do fine.
Comment by dhex —
September 2, 2009 @ 10:55 am
It doesn’t matter if you’re not a “math” person.
ehhhhhhhhh it really does, though. understanding math is a lot more like understanding a language than, say, understanding a topic.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 2, 2009 @ 11:42 am
It’s also a language that, for utterly inexplicable reasons, most mathematicians refuse to teach.
The practice of mathematics is fundamentally about proof, which are a very carefully structured form of argument. Yet for some reason, very few mathematics programs explicitly teach students what a proof is, or the rules of inference, or what does or doesn’t constitute a valid proof. At best, they get some truth tables and hand-waving about sets, which is basically useless. As a result, anyone who doesn’t pick out the general principles from the examples they see in class, gets locked out of mathematics.
What’s infuriating about this is that the logical revolution of the first half of the 20th century made all of this stuff totally accessible and teachable.
Comment by Picador —
September 2, 2009 @ 11:44 am
E.g., if you’re a patent law student, you’re going to do fine.
As a practicing patent lawyer, I’d have to say that yeah, we’re doing fine, but I’d still discourage anyone from entering this field on purpose. It takes a whole lot of school to get here (and about $200k+ of debt in the US), and the field is still crowded.
As for going into engineering: you might do okay if you grab something hard-core and unsexy, but anything involving software or anything primarily taking place in an academic environment means the job market is going to be terrible, with no signs that it will ever get anything but worse.
Honestly, my best advice to a smart 18-year-old might actually be to ditch college if you can bear it. Higher education is a lot of fun, but unless you can get a great deal on the tuition, the debt and the years won’t be worth it, career-wise. Look into the trades: plumbing, refrigeration, whatever. Preferably find a union job.
This is all assuming you’re not connected. If Daddy is a partner at a big lawfirm or manages a hedge fund, then yeah, definitely go into the family business. The mistake is thinking that a professional career is a good idea for people on the outside.
I’m not surprised by the LSAT thing. The test is a joke, and it’s probably the number-one reason the US is oversupplied with lawyers: anyone with half-decent analytical skills (necessarily including anyone who can pass a math or engineering course) can ace it, and then they think they’re destined to be a lawyer.
Comment by dhex —
September 2, 2009 @ 12:42 pm
It’s also a language that, for utterly inexplicable reasons, most mathematicians refuse to teach.
i think, in part, it’s because it’s something that should be handled in primary and secondary school (the groundwork that is) and like grammar and good writing habits, is more or less done very poorly.
Comment by socratic_me —
September 2, 2009 @ 1:31 pm
The practice of mathematics is fundamentally about proof, which are a very carefully structured form of argument.
I get awfully nervous when someone lays out what the practice of mathematics is fundamentally about. Partially, that is simply my recollection of how many of my college profs thought it was fundamentally about irreconcilable things. Of course, they were all dead certain that theirs was the only true understanding of what math was about.
For what it is worth, while proof is very important to mathematics, it is also irrelevant to most applications of mathematics into anything outside of academia.
As a mathematics instructor, I also find myself wondering why one would claim that mathematics is “more like a language than a topic”. To be honest, I am not even sure what that is supposed to mean. If it reads as I think it does –”once you get the vocabulary, everything else just follow“– then it is just silly and wrong, at least as far as most students experience it. There are rules and we follow them, to be sure. And mathematics does have some notation and language issues. However, a lot of mathematics is about exploring or studying the limits of a fairly basic set of rules. That seems to me to make it more like a “topic”, but then maybe I ma just misreading the whole claim in the first place.
Comment by Thoreau —
September 2, 2009 @ 1:34 pm
I sometimes feel like I’m using math as a language when I’m writing down equations to describe physical phenomena. At least at the beginning of the process I can assign a physical meaning to every term. Once I start solving, of course, things get moved around and approximated and it may be harder to assign physical meaning to everything, but in the first steps of my derivations I do indeed feel like I’m writing sentences.
Comment by socratic_me —
September 2, 2009 @ 1:34 pm
For what it is worth, there was a time when set theory and logic and the like were taught at the primary and secondary level as the essential basis of mathematics from which all else sprung. While the claim was literally true, it made for terrible pedagogy (something akin to starting with basic forces and building through physics to chemistry in primary school as the most “natural” way to approach science).
Comment by socratic_me —
September 2, 2009 @ 1:38 pm
Thoreau,
I agree that there is a language element to mathematics. But then you, well, do the math. It seems reasonable to suggest that one must learn the language of mathematics in order to translate problems into a format in which math can apply. It just seems odd to say that that is all that mathematics is. It would be akin to saying that computer science is a language (or set of languages) and ignore the whole part of computer science that is getting a computer to do things. Sure the language is vital, but it isn’t the topic itself.
Moreover, if you cannot do the math, then learning the translation rules doesn’t even help.
Comment by dhex —
September 2, 2009 @ 1:54 pm
As a mathematics instructor, I also find myself wondering why one would claim that mathematics is “more like a language than a topic”.
well, because i can learn about topics but if you’re jabbering at me in finnish i won’t know what the hell you’re on about.
math is a lot more like finnish than learning about the war of 1812. that’s all. it’s no slight to math, and of course to you – a math instructor – it doesn’t seem like a foreign language.
take algebra for instance. when i was tossed into pre-algebra (because i was good at all the other subjects and public schools are like that) no one ever took 10 minutes to explain why the hell there were letters and numbers running about. it was just thrown up there as “ok, well, let’s solve for a”.
to someone who understands (or speaks, really) math, that’s an obvious thing to do. to my poor seventh grade self it was some kinda cruel joke.
Comment by socratic_me —
September 2, 2009 @ 2:11 pm
dhex,
Okay, now I think I understand and I am pretty sure we agree. I do think there is a heavy language component. It is one of the things I spend a lot of time deliberately explaining (and expanding. For instance, my kids get lots of non-letter variables so they break themselves of thinking the letters are the thing). It just struck me as odd to treat that language issue as primary. While it is a huge hurdle that unfortunately gets ignored by too many mathematics instructors, there are also plenty of kids who work past that hurdle only to struggle on the actual mathematical ideas we are presenting (in Finnish) even once they master Finnish.
Comment by dhex —
September 2, 2009 @ 2:42 pm
perhaps a much better term to use, then, would be “mindset”? i’d use paradigm but that’s so web 1.0.
Comment by JasonL —
September 2, 2009 @ 3:05 pm
I was a physics major at a liberal arts college – after which I never did another thing with physics or math formally. That said, I’ve informally benefitted many times in my life from the kind of structured approach to problem solving and logical persuasion I encountered as a physics student. My physics prof thought I’d make a good lawyer. I don’t think that was a compliment.
Comment by Aresen —
September 3, 2009 @ 7:56 pm
I’ve taken some very basic math – integral calculus, trig, and matrices – and, while there is a “language” aspect to it, I honestly think the basis of math is philosophical.
For any given set of axioms, there are only certain things which can be proved; there are some things which cannot be determined; and there are some things which must be false. In many cases, the proof is arrived at not by showing something is true, but by showing any alternative must be false. Given certain values and operations, only one set of values can be derived from the initial conditions.
Comment by D.A. Ridgely —
September 4, 2009 @ 1:36 pm
I call BS. First, the study breaks down majors not to include philosophy/theology but, as I suspected, philosophy/religion. As a practical matter, theology is studied in a seminary, not as an undergraduate major. Moreover, undergraduate departments that combine religious studies and philosophy are notoriously (1) weak philosophically, (2) religiously biased or (3) both.
I’d like to see the actual study. Then I’d like to see physics or math majors linked with, oh, say, elementary education or sociology majors for a composite score and see where they rank then.
Comment by Kolohe —
September 6, 2009 @ 5:18 am
They don’t teach proofs in 9/10th grade geometry classes anymore? 20 years ago, that was the entire point of that course; it was certainly not to impart on teenagers what some dead greek guy thought about the uniqueness of a line that is both parallel to another line and goes through a specific point.