By Sklansky criteria: Jim Brier is the Smartest Poker Player

[benfranklin]

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One more thing: it usually takes about 3-4 years to get a PhD in math or theoretical science. It takes about 5-6 years for experimental physics or chemistry.

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When I was in grad school, the rule was that the lower the demand for graduates in a particular field, the longer the average time to get a degree. (Better to be an underpaid graduate assistant than an unemployed PhD.) [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[mosta]

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All great physicists are great mathimticians .. I don't see a difference between the two. Everything behind physics is mathimatical

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I'm not a mathematician or a physicist, but many of my good friends are. Apparently it is the case the Einstein pretty much wasted years of thought later in his life looking for a solution that Elie Cartan proved to be impossible. Einstein couldn't understand Cartan's work. Physicists "use" a lot of math. Mathematicians tend to think that they also pervert it, in deep and disturbing ways. So physicists definitely need to be good at math on some level, but aren't necessarily great it, and don't necessarily need to be. This isn't to say that Cartan is smarter than Einstein, or vice versa. But you can't subsume math to physics, not by a long shot. I personally tend to think that at the highest level math is harder, or more profound, or something. I think someone picking an undergrad major sophomore year has a much better chance of being able to learn enough to read and understand the work of the most recent Physics Nobel Prize than they do of being able to ever understand that of the most recent Fields Medalist. The forefront of mathematics is so far out there and so difficult that they might as well live in another world, and it could very well all be lost in a couple generations if an elite handful fails to perpetuate its isolated culture. And to compare the fields in another way, my impression is that a lot of recent theorizing in the forefront of physics has been wheel spinning and, potentially, producing a lot of BS. There is no BS in math. It becomes exceedingly abstract, and distant from any practical application, but it is never BS.

[mosta]

having made the claim above, I got an urge to revisit the article I'd read:

http://www.ams.org/notices/199701/coleman.pdf

JANUARY 1997 NOTICES OF THE AMS 15, p.15

I am not sure that other readers of [24 [Cartan-Einstein letters]] would
agree with my impression that it records an example
of the failure of group theory to influence
physics! If Einstein had had the mathematical
background necessary to understand Cartan, he
would not have spent the last decade of his life
in his fruitless search for a unified theory and
might have made additional revolutionary contributions
to physics. However, before making
depreciatory comments about Einstein’s mathematical
knowledge, it would be wise to note that
Weyl admitted in 1938 that he found Cartan’s
writings quite difficult; and as Chern and Chevalley
correctly state in their essay on Cartan’s
mathematical work [25], the rest of the mathematical
world was not much better than Weyl!

and:

Since he wanted
to obtain Newton’s theory in first approximation
and the equation for the newtonian
potential involves the Laplacian, Einstein
postulated that Gij should contain at most
second-order derivatives of gij and that these
occurred linearly. But—and this was very important
—being a democrat at heart, Einstein insisted
that his equation be covariant, that is, independent
of the coordinate system. Cartan
proved a posteriori that Einstein had discovered
the only possible set of equations consistent with
his desiderata. As a mathematician I regret to
admit that he did this, as subsequent interchange
[24] with Cartan demonstrates, with minimal
or zero understanding of the marvelous
subject we call group theory! Indeed, it has been
not infrequent that the intuition of a physicist
has outpaced the ratiocinations of mathematicians.