198
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Has anyone, based on great performance, ever been awarded a higher degree than the one they enrolled for?
Although a bit old, there's the case of Luzin's Master's thesis: . . . he completed his thesis The integral and trigonometric series which he submitted in 1915. After his oral examination he was ...
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151
votes
Has anyone, based on great performance, ever been awarded a higher degree than the one they enrolled for?
Donald Knuth:
When Donald Ervin Knuth was a college student at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1950s he showed such intelligence and talent that the faculty voted to award ...
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108
votes
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When and why did journal article titles become descriptive, rather than creatively allusive?
There's an interesting discussion of this in the introduction to Titles are "serious stuff": a historical study of academic titles by Salager-Meyer and Alcaraz Ariza (link). One point they ...
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108
votes
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How did researchers find articles before the Internet and the computer era?
We depended on libraries and librarians. Grad students would spend hours in, say, the math section of a good academic library, going from book to book and taking copious notes (on paper, of course).
...
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95
votes
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How were scientific plots made in the 1960s?
Those were typically made with lettering guides and French curves (I'd have liked to take a few pictures of mines, but I cannot recall where I put them: hundreds of hours at high school spent using ...
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89
votes
Has anyone, based on great performance, ever been awarded a higher degree than the one they enrolled for?
The famous Polish mathematician, Stefan Banach, famously received his PhD in 1920 without having had a college degree. In fact, its a pretty famous story, he did not want to get any sort of degree as ...
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83
votes
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Why did it become so much more expensive to start a university?
Besides all the factors that the other answer already lists, the elephant in the room is that KAUST has explicitly been designed to be a world-class university (rather than organically growing into ...
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68
votes
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Why did SoftwareX’ impact factor drop from 4.5 SJR to 0.4 last year?
I think this is a good example of putting too much faith in an average measure like Impact Factor or SJR when you talk about the 'reputation' of a journal.
In 2015, in its first year, SoftwareX ...
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67
votes
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How does it affect the treatment of a mathematician's results, if that mathematician was a Nazi?
I think there is no academic issue here.
The problem with Vahlen, as you may have guessed by the title, is that he was about as much of a Nazi as a person could be. He was in the SA, the SS, ...
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62
votes
How were scientific plots made in the 1960s?
This is less of an answer per se, but you mentioned you'd like to replicate the formatting for your own work. This can be done by hand if you want to, using the information in the top answer (thanks ...
- 501
61
votes
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Could one become a successful researcher by writing some really good papers while being outside academia?
My impression is that the likelihood of this is proportional to how theoretical the field that you have in mind is. In math or theoretical physics, it's at least imaginable for an outsider to produce ...
- 138k
51
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Why did some US universities require writing a translation to get a PhD?
Some personal evidence.
In the 1960s I had to show that I could read mathematics in at least one of French, German or (I think) Russian. That was a reasonable requirement at the time - much ...
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50
votes
White supremacists marching at the University of Virginia – does this reflect the university’s attitude?
The march, and even more so the violence, were strongly condemned by UVA. Here are some statements from the President of the university to that effect.
The mayor of Charlottesville condemned the ...
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50
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How did researchers find articles before the Internet and the computer era?
One point that the other answers have passed over is that there were various services the libraries subscribed to which surveyed the literature and provided abstracts and cross indexing of the primary ...
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48
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48
votes
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Who said that one should change one’s direction of research every seven years?
I think I found it! Richard Hamming, mathematician and Turing Award recipient said it in a 1986 seminar at Bell Labs. The talk was titled "You and Your Research", and a transcript is ...
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40
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Has anyone, based on great performance, ever been awarded a higher degree than the one they enrolled for?
Not quite the same, but George Dantzig famously solved two previously unsolved problems in statistical theory as a graduate student, after showing up late for class and mistaking them for homework ...
39
votes
When and why did journal article titles become descriptive, rather than creatively allusive?
I have no evidence for this, but I'd guess that a significant factor is that at one time, people used to subscribe to particular journals and read, or at least skim, every article in every issue. So ...
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34
votes
May I call Samuel Johnson a PhD?
No.
He was an LL D of Trinity College, granted 1765; and a DCL of Oxford, granted 1775.
See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Johnson
Note:
DCL= Doctor of Civil Law.
LL.D.= Doctor of ...
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33
votes
What is the reason that once a student has passed a university course, the student cannot take the course again?
In the United States, institutions that have such a rule do so primarily because of the requirement of satisfactory academic progress, or SAP, that is imposed by some, perhaps many, forms of financial ...
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33
votes
Could one become a successful researcher by writing some really good papers while being outside academia?
There is nothing that prevents you from doing so. It's just very hard for a couple of reasons:
Without working at an academic institution (or something similar), you lack the environment to exchange ...
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31
votes
Were predatory journals widespread before publishers of reputable journals introduced the "author pays" model?
Anecdotally, a significant proportion of journals on post-Soviet space in 90s were quite happy to publish literally anything as long as author covers the "publication costs". The peer-review was ...
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31
votes
How did researchers find articles before the Internet and the computer era?
(Comment extended to post:)
My impression is that part of the answer is "they didn't", or more precisely "they were only as good at it as their own knowledge and that of their communities". In ...
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30
votes
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Has the Journal of Fluid Mechanics really published more than 800 volumes?
From the website it looks like they publish a "volume" every two weeks which would mean that the journal is somewhat between 30 and 40 years old.
I do not know if there is a universally ...
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29
votes
Accepted
White supremacists marching at the University of Virginia – does this reflect the university’s attitude?
White supremacists marching at the University of Virginia – does this reflect the university’s attitude?
No, absolutely not. Here's the President of UVA's statement from before the earlier rally (...
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28
votes
Why did some US universities require writing a translation to get a PhD?
To comment on the "why": at a certain point a lot of work in many fields, including mathematics, was untranslated from the original into other languages. There was lots of critically ...
- 399k
27
votes
Why are positions in math so hard to come by nowadays?
I agree with the earlier answers that the fundamental issue is an imbalance between the number academic positions and the number of people aiming for an academic career. However, there's some context ...
26
votes
Has anyone, based on great performance, ever been awarded a higher degree than the one they enrolled for?
Ludwig Wittgenstein was famously awarded his PhD in Philosophy by his advisor, Bertrand Russell, entirely on the basis of classwork completed for his prior degree, plus the addition of a book he had ...
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26
votes
White supremacists marching at the University of Virginia – does this reflect the university’s attitude?
I know almost nothing about academia but as someone who is familiar with the area, I think we need to set a few things straight. There are some implications in the question that suggest basic ...
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26
votes
May I call Samuel Johnson a PhD?
I am not sure why you would want to do this, but it seems both anachronistic and misleading. Johnson was not awarded a PhD by either institution, and the degree he was awarded was not equivalent to a ...
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