I asked Cleve about what made him decide that the singular value decomposition, and later MATLAB, were topics worth focusing on. What sources of information did he look to? Was he trying to discern what other people were interested in?
What I took in from his response was that he never picked topics based on the scale of the potential application. For example, he didn’t decide to study the mathematics underpinning computer graphics because of the applied importance of computer graphics. He just has a relentless interest in the underlying mathematics, and wants to understand it. What can we learn about the quaternion, a 4x4 matrix that’s the workhorse of computer graphics? This understanding of these topics developed bit by bit, through small-scale interactions with other people.
We should treat this sort of account with skepticism, both because it’s a subjective assessment of his own history, and because it’s a single and unrepresentative example of the outcomes of academic mathematical research. Cleve might have simply lucked into a billion-dollar topic. The fact that we’re all asking him about his background is the result of selecting for outcomes, not necessarily for an unusually effective process.
But I think what he was saying was that to find ideas that are likely to nerd snipe somebody else, it’s important to use your judgment and try to identify components of a field in an academic sense that are clearly important, and try to understand them better. Having a sense of judgment for the importance of components of a system seems like an important underlying skill for the “lean startup” approach you’re describing here.
I asked Cleve about what made him decide that the singular value decomposition, and later MATLAB, were topics worth focusing on. What sources of information did he look to? Was he trying to discern what other people were interested in?
What I took in from his response was that he never picked topics based on the scale of the potential application. For example, he didn’t decide to study the mathematics underpinning computer graphics because of the applied importance of computer graphics. He just has a relentless interest in the underlying mathematics, and wants to understand it. What can we learn about the quaternion, a 4x4 matrix that’s the workhorse of computer graphics? This understanding of these topics developed bit by bit, through small-scale interactions with other people.
We should treat this sort of account with skepticism, both because it’s a subjective assessment of his own history, and because it’s a single and unrepresentative example of the outcomes of academic mathematical research. Cleve might have simply lucked into a billion-dollar topic. The fact that we’re all asking him about his background is the result of selecting for outcomes, not necessarily for an unusually effective process.
But I think what he was saying was that to find ideas that are likely to nerd snipe somebody else, it’s important to use your judgment and try to identify components of a field in an academic sense that are clearly important, and try to understand them better. Having a sense of judgment for the importance of components of a system seems like an important underlying skill for the “lean startup” approach you’re describing here.