the job market for mathematics is just about to explode. the majority of faculty members are within 10 years of retirement, and there is simply not enough new phds coming through the pipeline to meet the demand.
however, if you are not passionate about mathematics then your chances of obtaining a phd are in every neighbourhood of zero. in fact you would not likely graduate from an honours undergrad program.
if you are, then i urge you to follow your dreams and work very hard during your undergrad degree. you will (presumably) be broke and extremely busy for 4 difficult years, but once you get into grad program life looks very very good. excellent grad students can get paid circa $us 22k a year to go to school and there are plenty of opportunities to travel.
the life of a tenured professor, teaching and doing research, is one of the most honourable and privileged careers in our society. note that i didn't say lucrative.
so go for it, and good luck !
ps: be sure to take a foundations of mathematics from an actual logician and read as much history as you can...
Re:Faster than light communication
on
Quantum Holography
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No.
This concept was originally conceived sometime around 1930 by einstein, podolsky, and rosen as an argument intended to torpedo quantum mechanics.
basically they pointed out that quantum mechanics predicts that if you prepared a four state quantum mechanical system (ie 2 qubits) in a certain way (creating an EPR pair) they would exhibit "spooky action at a distance". at the time it was a fundamental principle that cause and effect had to obey the speed of light and therefore quantum mechanics was broken.
turns out there is massive amounts of evidance that cause and effect can be instantaneous over any distance and quantum mechanics goes on to be the most succesful scientific theory in history.
the scenario is this: alice and bob create an EPR pair, and then each takes one to opposite ends of the universe. when alice measures the state of her qubit, bob's qubit instantly becomes a known quantity.
it has been proven that to use this effect for communication requires the communication of classical bits of information (i believe it is the result of alice's measurement) which are governed by the speed of light. hence quantum entanglement can not be used as a truly instant messaging transport.
however, you can use this effect to achieve perfectly secure cryptographic key distribution and this has actually been done several times.
quantum computing is super cool and might actually be practical. check out http://www.qubit.org for some well chosen tutorial papers and links.
Slashdot Mirror
the job market for mathematics is just about to explode. the majority of faculty members are within 10 years of retirement, and there is simply not enough new phds coming through the pipeline to meet the demand.
...
however, if you are not passionate about mathematics then your chances of obtaining a phd are in every neighbourhood of zero. in fact you would not likely graduate from an honours undergrad program.
if you are, then i urge you to follow your dreams and work very hard during your undergrad degree. you will (presumably) be broke and extremely busy for 4 difficult years, but once you get into grad program life looks very very good. excellent grad students can get paid circa $us 22k a year to go to school and there are plenty of opportunities to travel.
the life of a tenured professor, teaching and doing research, is one of the most honourable and privileged careers in our society. note that i didn't say lucrative.
so go for it, and good luck !
ps: be sure to take a foundations of mathematics from an actual logician and read as much history as you can
No.
This concept was originally conceived sometime around 1930 by einstein, podolsky, and rosen as an argument intended to torpedo quantum mechanics.
basically they pointed out that quantum mechanics predicts that if you prepared a four state quantum mechanical system (ie 2 qubits) in a certain way (creating an EPR pair) they would exhibit "spooky action at a distance". at the time it was a fundamental principle that cause and effect had to obey the speed of light and therefore quantum mechanics was broken.
turns out there is massive amounts of evidance that cause and effect can be instantaneous over any distance and quantum mechanics goes on to be the most succesful scientific theory in history.
the scenario is this: alice and bob create an EPR pair, and then each takes one to opposite ends of the universe. when alice measures the state of her qubit, bob's qubit instantly becomes a known quantity.
it has been proven that to use this effect for communication requires the communication of classical bits of information (i believe it is the result of alice's measurement) which are governed by the speed of light. hence quantum entanglement can not be used as a truly instant messaging transport.
however, you can use this effect to achieve perfectly secure cryptographic key distribution and this has actually been done several times.
quantum computing is super cool and might actually be practical. check out http://www.qubit.org for some well chosen tutorial papers and links.