Reading his papers, he manages to connect basic geometric ideas (like the notion of "isoperimetry", i.e., enclosing the maximum volume within a given perimeter) to probabilistic notions like convergence of averages. It links together stuff you learn in information theory (the probability mass of the "typical set"), and in machine learning (deviations of an training-set error rate from a true error rate), and in probability theory (empirical processes).
His papers typically had an introduction that related the main theorem to some of these basic geometric notions. The introduction would reveal a whole new, very intuitive and geometric connection between a very abstract theorem to basic geometry, like the volume of a spherical shell. It would routinely blow my mind.
I really enjoy this sort of story. Someone persevering in an unpopular arena for the love of it, and then having it become quite essential for the advancement of humanities goals as it is developed.
This is such a great quote for everyone! No matter the age. No matter what one wants to do.
> “I’m not able to learn mathematics easily,” Talagrand tells ... “I have to work. It takes a very long time and I have a terrible memory. I forget things. So I try to work, despite handicaps, and the way I worked was trying to understand really well the simple things. Really, really well, in complete detail. And that turned out to be a successful approach.”
Just imagine. You may be super smart who gets things easily and right away. Or, you may be average. Using this philosophy in life, one can excel further.
I didn't know about his inequalities, but I found (1) that provides an example of using Talagrand inequality applied to the longest increasing subsequence problem (12 pages, easy to read). It seems to be a broad generalization of the Hamming distance.
> He recalls with delight that he once used a cab service whose owner recognized his name, having learned the inequality during a probability class in business school.
The taxi drivers in France are cut from different cloth!
I know Talagrand because some of his work comes up in topological dynamics (work around Rosenthal's l¹-dichotomy culminating in the Bourgain-Fremlin-Talagrand dicothomy for compact sets of Baire class 1 functions), but I had no idea he has such accomplishments in other fields! Impressive
I've been reading it over the past few days (picked it up after seeing it mentioned here). It's fantastic, much better than many similar attempts to make quantum field theory comprehensible to mathematicians.
Ironically, the Wikipedia pages about him in French [1] and English [2] are, currently, super short. It will help if Wikipedia (just giving them as an example) could handle the focus on certain people and topics in an smarter way and not after the facts. Wikipedia has a special opportunity about handling this because it is the canonical general reference on Internet.
Hallucinated or not I found a better starting point on [3], a Reddit post of 2 years ago with a comment saying:
"Even professional mathematicians are barely qualified to choose the best mathematician in their narrow field of expertise, let alone in general…
(Before I left math, the most difficult work I encountered was by Michel Talagrand.)" [4] and last, but would be first indeed his own web page [5]. He even gives prizes ala Knuth for solving specific math problems.
Last, really few mentions in *stackexchange.com and Reddit.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, they intentionally only cover topics retroactively, and preferably after the dust has settled. They're intentionally not intending to be many things, including a source of up to date news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
> If you are desperate to get my books and your library can't afford them, try to type the words "library genesis" in a search engine. I disagree with piracy, but this site saved me many trips to the library, which unfortunately does not carry electronic versions of older books.
That was me on Reddit. I emailed him asking about some of his work on invariant means in the 1970s. He said “I had no taste then”, and told me what a waste of time it was.
At that point, I decided to go into data science instead of trying to get a post doc…
[+] [-] mturmon|2 years ago|reply
Reading his papers, he manages to connect basic geometric ideas (like the notion of "isoperimetry", i.e., enclosing the maximum volume within a given perimeter) to probabilistic notions like convergence of averages. It links together stuff you learn in information theory (the probability mass of the "typical set"), and in machine learning (deviations of an training-set error rate from a true error rate), and in probability theory (empirical processes).
His papers typically had an introduction that related the main theorem to some of these basic geometric notions. The introduction would reveal a whole new, very intuitive and geometric connection between a very abstract theorem to basic geometry, like the volume of a spherical shell. It would routinely blow my mind.
[+] [-] zafka|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strikelaserclaw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webwanderings|1 year ago|reply
> “I’m not able to learn mathematics easily,” Talagrand tells ... “I have to work. It takes a very long time and I have a terrible memory. I forget things. So I try to work, despite handicaps, and the way I worked was trying to understand really well the simple things. Really, really well, in complete detail. And that turned out to be a successful approach.”
Just imagine. You may be super smart who gets things easily and right away. Or, you may be average. Using this philosophy in life, one can excel further.
[+] [-] bruturis|2 years ago|reply
(1) https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/hmaji/teaching/Spring%202018...
[+] [-] anthk|2 years ago|reply
http://doc.9gridchan.info/blog/181230.ncubic.routing http://doc.9gridchan.info/blog/190104.ncubic.algorithms
Fromm mycrovtif (RIP), a guy from the plan9/9front community.
[+] [-] matsemann|2 years ago|reply
Was that after sampling 1/e prospects?
(The "marriage problem" is applied statistics on when it's optimal to stop searching for something https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem )
[+] [-] agumonkey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novariation|2 years ago|reply
Talagrands' results seem to generalize those, but I haven't had the chance to see them in the wild (yet).
[+] [-] esafak|2 years ago|reply
The taxi drivers in France are cut from different cloth!
[+] [-] sn9|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hervature|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ginnungagap|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2716057|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amai|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cevi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nyc111|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wslh|2 years ago|reply
Hallucinated or not I found a better starting point on [3], a Reddit post of 2 years ago with a comment saying:
"Even professional mathematicians are barely qualified to choose the best mathematician in their narrow field of expertise, let alone in general…
(Before I left math, the most difficult work I encountered was by Michel Talagrand.)" [4] and last, but would be first indeed his own web page [5]. He even gives prizes ala Knuth for solving specific math problems.
Last, really few mentions in *stackexchange.com and Reddit.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Talagrand
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Talagrand
[3] https://chat.openai.com/share/39374448-da85-4897-977a-aaa37e...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/s81ysm/who_would_you_...
[5] https://michel.talagrand.net/
[6] https://www.google.com/search?q=Michel+Talagrand+site%3Astac... and https://www.google.com/search?q=Michel+Talagrand+site%3Aredd...
[+] [-] epgui|2 years ago|reply
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, they intentionally only cover topics retroactively, and preferably after the dust has settled. They're intentionally not intending to be many things, including a source of up to date news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
[+] [-] captn3m0|2 years ago|reply
> If you are desperate to get my books and your library can't afford them, try to type the words "library genesis" in a search engine. I disagree with piracy, but this site saved me many trips to the library, which unfortunately does not carry electronic versions of older books.
[+] [-] hopfenspergerj|2 years ago|reply
At that point, I decided to go into data science instead of trying to get a post doc…
[+] [-] pyb|2 years ago|reply
I also wish there was a mechanism to prune certain Wikipedia pages that carry way too much detail, given the notability of their subject.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] idkdotcom|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tilakxd|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tilakxd|2 years ago|reply
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