YouSaid · the spoken record

Po-Shen Loh

lines on the record: 147
first: 2021-05-14
most recent: 2021-05-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That comes in many ways. And I will say it's great if. One wants to build that with mathematics, but it's also great to use that philosophy with all other things. In fact, if I just think of myself, I just think, what do I know now that I didn't know a year ago or a month ago or a week ago? And not just know, but like what do I have the capability of doing? And the futures have that attitude, it brings more.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Targeted towards middle school students with competitions, but there is a lot of high school students who didn't do competitions in middle school, where they would also learn how to think. If you can see the whole concept was, can we teach people how to think? How would you do that? You need to give people the chance to, on their own, invent without that kid in the front row answering every question in two seconds.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You still think, and a minute later, a big hint pops on the screen, and you still think, and then finally, after the three minutes, hopefully, you got some ideas, you try to answer. And then suddenly there's like this pretty extended explanation of, oh yeah, so here's multiple different ways that you can do the question. And by accident, you also just learn this other concept. That's what we did.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, sure. So that's actually what we did when I guess I was thinking about how would I try to develop that skill in people if we had the power to architect the entire system ourselves. So that's called the daily challenge with Pochenlo. It's not free because that's actually how I pay for everything else I do. That was the idea. But the concept was, aha, now let's invent from scratch. So if we're going to go from scratch and we're going to use technology, what if we made every single lesson, something where first I say, hey, here's an interesting question, record it, of course. It's not live, but it's like, I say, hey, here's an interesting question. Why don't we think about this? But I know you don't know how to do it. So now you think. And a minute later, a hint pops on the screen.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are those about? We do that too. But I mean, the difference was ours isn't, that one's not free. I should actually probably be careful. The things that I've just mentioned are also not free. Not all of those things I mentioned just now are free either.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, yeah. So there are a number of different ones that are quite popular. One of them is called Math Counts, M-A-T-H-C-O-U-N-T-S. And that's a big tournament which actually has a state level. There's also a math league.org, Math League L-E-A-G-U-E.org also has this kind of tier the tournament structure. There's also the American Math Competitions, AMC 8. AMC also has AMC 10. That's for 10th grade and below, and AMC 12. These are all run by the Mathematical Association of America. And these are always defined old questions.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, think that these math competition problems in this school and high school are really good. They're actually very hard So if you haven't had this kind of experience before and you grab a middle school math competition problem from the state level, which is used to decide who represents the state in the country, in the United States, for example. Those are pretty tricky, and even if you are a professional, maybe not doing mathematical things and you're not a middle school student, you'll struggle. So, I find that these things really do teach you things by trying to work on these questions”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that the key is to show that they have some, let them see that they have some power to invent. And at that point, it's often starting by trying to give a question that they don't know how to do. You want to find these questions that they don't know how to do, that they can think about, and then they can solve. And then suddenly they say, my gosh, I've had a situation, I've had an experience where I didn't know what to do. And after a while, I did.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, I really think that every student can pick up all of this skill. I really do think so. I don't think it's something only for a few. And so if I'm looking for a student, actually oftentimes if I'm looking at a particular student, the question is, how can we help you feel like you have the power to invent also? Because I think a lot of people are used to thinking about math as something where the teacher will show you what to do, and then you will do it.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I actually do think that the middle school is exactly the right time because that's the place where your mathematical understanding gets just sophisticated enough that you can start doing interesting things Because if you're early on in counting, I'm honestly not very good at teaching you new insights. My wife is pretty good at that. But somehow, once you get to this part where you know what a fraction is, and when you know how to add and how to multiply and what the area of a triangle is, at that point to me, the whole world opens up and you can start observing there are really nifty coincidences, the things that made the Greek mathematicians and the ancient mathematicians excited. Actually back then, it was exciting to discover the Pythagorean theorem. Wasn't just homework.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, pretty good. I'll never get stuck. I mean, I'm willing to go on camera and say Guess what? Potion, though, can't do this. That's fine. But then what ends up happening is you will then see how maybe somebody's saying something and I look at the chat and I say, aha, that actually looks useful. Now that also shows how Not all ideas, not all suggestions are the same power. That makes sense because if I actually do get stuck, I'll go fishing through the chat. If you've got any ideas”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just by this one short, fast way this is the right way, if that makes sense. So my point is I'm actually always thinking about that, like how would you think about these things? And then I eventually decided the easiest way to expose this would just be to go live on YouTube and just say, I've never seen any of these questions before. Here we go.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reason I do this is to let the middle school students and the high school students and the adults whoever wants to watch just see what exactly goes on through someone's head as they go and attempt to invent what they need to do to solve the question. So I've actually thought about that. I think that first of all as a teacher, I think about that because whenever I want to explain to a student how to do something, I want to explain how it made sense, why it's intuitive to do the following things and why the wrong things are wrong.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is interesting. So, I tried to do this to teach middle school students how to learn how to create and think and invent. And the way I do it is there are these math competition problems, and I'm working in collaboration with the people who run those, and I will turn on my YouTube live, and for the first time look at those questions and live solve them.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably not approximating everything that's going on inside. So there's basically a function being computed. But it's hard to articulate what that function is. Now, the question is could a computer get as good at computing these kinds of heuristic functions? Maybe I'm not enough of an expert to understand, but one bit of me has always been a little bit curious of whether or not the human brain has a particular tendency due to its wiring to come up with certain kinds of things. Which is just natural due to the way that the topology of the neurons and whatever is there, for which if you try to just build from scratch a computer to do it, would it naturally have different tendencies? I don't know. This is just me being completely ignorant and just saying a few ideas.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I guess, you see, because if I just think of the raw search space, it's huge That's why you can't do it. And if I think about what makes somebody good at doing these things, they have this heuristic sense. It's almost like a good chess player of saying, let's not keep analyzing down this way because there's some heuristic reason why that's a bad way to go. Yes. Did they get that heuristic from? Now, that's a good question. I don't know because that, if you ask them to explain to you, they could probably say something in words that sounds like it makes sense, but I'm guessing that's only a part of what's really going on in their brain, of evaluating that position. You know what I mean? If you ask Gary Kasparov what is good or why is this position good? He will say something.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably if we compare notes, there might be some similarities between both of us realizing that pi is important. Because you might say why humans do humans like circles more than others? I think stars also like circles. I think planets like circles. They're not perfect circles, but nevertheless, the concept of a circle is just point and constant distance doesn't get any simpler than that.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I personally feel like it's discovered, but that's also because I guess the way that I like to choose what questions to work on are questions that maybe we'll get to learn something about why is this hard. I mean, I'm often attracted to questions that look simple but are hard, right? And what could you possibly learn from that, sort of like probably the attraction of Ferma's last theorem, as you mentioned, simple statement, why is it so hard? So I'm more on the discovered side and I also feel like if we ever ran into an intelligent other species in the universe,”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, that's the key. You've got to find good people to learn things from. But his thing was, he often said, if you solve a math problem and have this math proof for him is like a proof, right? So suppose you came up with this proof, he always asks, what have we learned from this that we could potentially use for something else? It's not just, did you solve the problem that was supposed to be famous? And is there something new in the course of solving this that you had to invent that we could now use as a tool elsewhere?”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I like what you said. This is something that I learned from another friend of mine who's also, he's a very famous researcher. All these people are more famous than I am. His name is Jacob Fox. He's Jacob Fox at Stanford, also a very big inspiration for me. We were both grad students together at the same time.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same way. I'm the same way. In fact, that's how I know whether I might want to keep thinking about this general problem. It's like if I still see that I'm getting some insights, I'm not at the dead end yet. But that's also where I learned something from my PhD advisor. Actually, he was a real big inspiration on my life. His name is Benny Sudakov. In fact, he grew up in the former Soviet Union. He was from Georgia But he's an incredible person. But one thing I learned was choose the problems to work on. That might matter if you succeed. Because that's why, for example, we dug into COVID. It was just, well, suppose we succeed in finding some interesting insight here. Well, it actually matters. Then it's worthwhile”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think this is interesting because you raised Andrew Weils. He spent seven years attacking the same thing Right, and so I think that what attracts professional researchers to this is because even though it's very painful that you keep fighting with something, when you finally find the right insights and string them together, it feels really good.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if I know that it's a short proof, I know that there's only one inside. So when I'm doing my own way of solving the problem, like finding the proof, I quit if I have to do too many plugins. It's equivalent to a math contest. In a math contest, I look, is it problem one, two, or three that tells me how many insights there are? This is exactly what I did.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, yeah, because it's not clear why anything was done that way. And yes, everything is true, but how the heck did anyone think of that? So, the way that I taught myself math eventually was the way I read a math textbook is I would look at the theorem statement, I would look at the length of the proof, and then I would close the book and attempt to reprove it myself. The length of the proof is telling you the number of insights because the length of the proof is linear in the number of insights. Each insight takes space.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, those are the hard bonds. And also, I can tell you how you can tell. Is how I also taught myself math when I was in college. So if you are taking a, not taught myself, I was taking classes, of course, but I was trying to read the textbook. And I found out I was very bad at reading math textbooks. A math textbook has a long page of stuff that is all true, which after you read the page, you have no idea what you just read. This is just a summary.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is not three times as hard as a one inside problem because after you've made the one insight, it's not clear that that was the right track necessarily. Unless you're still the brand.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I could quantify it by the number of leaps of insight, of changes of perspective that are along the way. And here's why. This is like a very theoretical computer science way of looking at it. Okay, it's that each reframing of the problem and using of some tool, I actually call that a leap of insight. When you say, oh, wow, now I see I should kind of put these plugs into those sockets like so. And suddenly I get to use that machine. Oh, but I'm not done yet. Now I need to do it again. Each such step is a large fan out in the search space. The number of these tells you the exponent. The base of the exponent is like how many different possibilities you could try. That's actually why if you have a three insight problem.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we just hope that it's not happening. So we write in English. Therefore, everything that the US does, everyone can look at. So it's very hard for me. It's very hard for you to manipulate. We don't manipulate. We only hope that other people aren't. But at the same time, as you see, our philosophy was we want to use this as a way to develop general talent. And although we do this for the six people who go to the International Math Olympiad, we really want that everyone at any touch at any stage of this process gets some skills that can help to contribute more later.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Table and we will say we think we want less than what you gave us. This is how these are our principles. If you give us too much, we say no, you gave us too much. We do that. However, the reason why this is an interesting process is because And so, if you're trying to grade the Mongolian scripts and they're written in Mongolian If you don't read Mongolian, which most people don't, then the coaches are. Explaining to you this is what the student has written. It's actually quite interesting process.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's pretty close because you know that maybe you're just off five. By the way, they're not numerical anyway, but I'm just giving some numerical analog to the way the scoring might work. They are all essays. And that's where, I guess, I have some role as well as some other people who help me in the US delegation for coaches. We actually debate with the country which is organizing it, the country which is organizing the Olympia brings about 50 people to help judge the written solutions and you schedule these half hour appointments where the delegation from one country sits down at a table like this. Opposite side is two or three people from the host country and they're just looking over these exam papers saying well how many points is this worth based on some rubric that has been designed and this is a negotiation process where we're not we're not trying to bargain and get the best score we can in fact sometimes go to the”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way it works is that each of the six students do the problems, and there are six problems. All the problems are equally weighted, so each one's worth seven points. That means that your maximum score is six problems times seven points, which is the nice number of 42. And now the way that they're scored, by the way, is there's partial credit. So the question is asking you, explain why this weird fact is true. Okay, if you explain why, you get seven points. If you make minor mistake, maybe you get six points. But if you don't succeed in explaining why, but you explain some other true fact, which is along the way of proving it, then you get partial credit. And actually, now this is tricky because how do you score such a thing? It's not like it was the answer was 72 and you wrote 71 and it's close, right? The answer is 72 and you wrote 36.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's how I go, right? My point is I have explained to people when I teach you, I don't want you to have remembered a method I showed you. I want you to have learned enough about this area that if you face a new question, which I came up with the night before by thinking about like, what could I ask that I have never asked before? Oh, that's cute. I wonder what the answer is. Aha, that's an exam problem. That's exactly what I do before the exam. And then that's what I want them to learn. And the first exam usually people have a rough time because it's like, what kind of crazy class is this? The professor doesn't teach you anything for the exam. But then by the second or third, and by the time they finish the class, they have learned how to solve anything in the area. Event in that area”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So actually, the way I teach my classes at Carnegie Mellon, which I will admit right away, is not equivalent to the average in the world, but it's already not just the top 60 in the country as picked by something. Let me just explain, I have exams in my class, which are 90% of the grade. So the exams are the whole thing, or most of the whole thing. And the way that I let students prepare for the exams is I show them all the problems I've ever given on the previous exams. And the exam that they will take is open notes. They can take all the notes they want on the previous problems. And the guarantee is that the exam problems this time will have no overlap with anything you have seen me given in the past, as well as no overlap with anything I taught in the class. So the entire exam is invention.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that hopefully some of them get ideas because in 20 30 years, I won't have the energy or the insight to solve problems. We'll have another catastrophe. And hopefully some of these people will step up and do it.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very strong minds as picked through this system because the coach works with these guests who run a camp for these students. I said I'm actually not going to define my success in terms of winning this contest. I said I wanted to maximize the number of the students that I read about in the New York Times in 20 years. And the executive director of the mathematical association of America was fully in support of this because that's also how their philosophy is. So in America, the way we run this is we're actually not just training to win, even though the students are very good and they can win anyway. One reason, for example, I went and even did the COVID thing involving quite a few of them.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No reason why that message can't be sent. Everywhere. And I think it actually should be. So that's the first thing. The second thing is what you commented about this thing about the generalizable skill and what could people do with Olympiads afterwards. So that's actually my interest in the whole thing. I don't just coach students how to do problems. In fact, I'm not even the best person for that. I'm not the best at solving these problems. There are other people who are much better at making problems and teaching people how to solve problems. In fact, when I mathematical association of America, which is the group which is in charge of the US participation in these Olympiads, when they were deciding whether or not to put me in back in 2013 as the head coach, I had a conversation with their executive director where I commented that we might do worse because my position was I don't, I mean, I actually didn't want to focus on winning. I said, if you're going to let me work with 60”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, actually, I want to respond to a couple of things there. The first one is one which is this notion of whether or not that is possible in a non-authoritarian regime. I think it is. And that's actually why I spent some of my efforts before the COVID thing actually trying to work towards there. The reason is because if you think about it, let's say in America, lots of people are pretty serious about training very hard for football or baseball or basketball, basketball is very, very accessible. But lots of people are doing that. Why? Well, actually, I think that what was going on with authoritarian thing was at least the message that was universally sent was being a good thinker and a creator of ideas is a good thing.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just playing with ideas of how to prove things. And if you get pretty good at inventing creative ways to turn problems apart, split them apart, observe neat ways to turn messy things into simple crystals. Well, if you're going to try to solve any real problem in the real world, that could be a really handy tool too. So I don't think it was a bad investment. I think clearly it worked well for Soviet Union.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and actually, I also think that it made sense from the Soviet Union's perspective. Because if you look at what these people do eventually, even though, let's look at the USSR's Olympic International Math Olympiad record, even though they, I say even though they won a lot of awards at the high school thing, many of them went on to do incredible things in research mathematics or research other things. And that's showing the generalization of what they were working on. Because ultimately,”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So each country can send six people and the score of the country is actually unofficial. There's not an official country versus country system, although everyone just adds up the point scores of the six people and they say, well, now which country stacked up where?”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the problem is that at the beginning, when you look at each of the questions, first of all, you have four and a half hours to solve three questions. And this is one day, and then you have a second day, which is four and a half hours, three questions. But when you look at the questions, they're all asking you, explain why the following thing is true, which you've never seen before. And by the way, even though there are six questions, if you solve any one of them, you're a genius and you get an honorable mention. So this is hard to solve the honor.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So, this is the competition for people who aren't yet in college, math competition, which is the most prestigious one in the entire world. It's the Olympics of mathematics, but only for people who aren't yet in college. Now, the kinds of questions that they ask you to do are not computational. Usually you're not supposed to find that the answer is 42 Instead, you're supposed to explain why something is true.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that being able to look at a complicated problem which looks unsolvable, and then to be able to change the perspective to come from a different angle and suddenly see that there's a nice solution. I don't mean that every problem in math is supposed to be this way, but I think that these reframings and changing of perspectives that cause difficult things to get simplified and crystallized and factored in certain ways is beautiful. Actually, that's related to what we were just talking about with even this fighting pandemics. The crystal idea was just quantify proximity by the number of relationships in the physical network instead of just by the feet and meters, right? It's just that if you change that perspective, now all of these things follow. And so mathematics to me is beautiful in the pure sense just for that.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for ours, if you're on the app and saying, I'm positive, you can either just say that, and that's called unverified. You can enter in one of these codes that you got from the local health authority. So basically, for anyone who's watching this, it's not that you should just go and download it unless you want to go and look at it. That's cool But if you, on the other hand, if you happen to know anyone at the local health authority, which is trying to figure out how to handle COVID, well, then, I mean, we'd be very happy to also work with you.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, I didn't come on here to tell everyone to install the app. I did not come to tell everyone to install the app because it works best if your local health authority is working with us. A reason it's because this is back to the game theory If anyone could just say, I'm positive. The high school senior prank would be to say that we have a massive outbreak on finals week. Let's not have final exams. So, the way that our system works, it actually borrows some ideas, not borrows. We came up with them independently. But this idea is similar to what Google and Apple do, which is that if the local health authority is working with this, they can, for everyone who's positive, give them a passcode that expires in a short time.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that would just be us. I mean, the Novid.org website has. It has a feedback reach out form. And actually, we are, I mean, again, this is the DNA of being a researcher. I am actually very excited by the idea that this could contribute knowledge that will outlast all of our generations, like all of our lifetimes.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and what I'm doing right now is this is basically interdisciplinary research where maybe our side is bringing the technology and the network theory and the missing parts are epidemiology and public health expertise. And if the two things start to join, also because everywhere that you deploy, let's just say that the world is different in the Philippines as it is in the United States and just the natures of the locality would mean that someone like me should not be trying to figure out how to do that. But if we can work with the researchers who are based there. Now suddenly we might come up with a solution that will help scale in parts of the world where they aren't all getting the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines which cost like $20 a pop in the US.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's actually ongoing work right now. And so, for example, if anyone's watching this and you happen to be a public health researcher and you want to be involved in something like this, I'm just going to say I'm still incentive thinking. There is something in it for the researchers too. This could open up an entire new way of controlling disease. That's my hope. I mean, it might actually be true. people who are involved in figuring out how to make this work, well, it could actually be good for their careers too. I always have to think like if a researcher was getting involved, what are they getting out of it?”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am actually still an academic and a researcher. So the biggest work I'm working on right now is to try to build as many collaborations with other public health researchers at other universities to actually work on pilot deployments together in various places. That's the goal.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you are, if you are, if you are. And the quarantine is like, yes, in that case, if you're quarantining, it's because you're shutting the door from the inside, if that makes sense. Yes, exactly.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source