Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Sometimes You Just Need ...

... to know you are not utterly alone in your path, chosen or otherwise. Sometimes you just need to know about someone who walked as you now walk, and did not fall off into the abyss.

The Pursuit of Beauty
Yitang Zhang solves a pure-math mystery.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/pursuit-beauty

“You must have been unhappy.”
He shrugged. “My life is not always easy,” he said.
I am no genius like he is, but I have some faith I'm not completely incompetent even during times when my sense of self-worth is shot.

1 comment:

Kevin Jang said...

You know, just judging by the example of Catherine Lim, who is Singapore's most famous author and writer, I wonder what the route of academics post-PhD to survival entails. She has a PhD in Linguistics, and was never exactly employed in full capacity as a lecturer anywhere in any of the public universities in Singapore, although she probably has worked as a lecturer on ad hoc basis at MOE or NIE if I am right. She even got into a legal scuffle once with that 'woody' political figure who sued her simply for claiming that there was an affective divide between the dominant party and the people of Singapore, and did not file for bankruptcy after having paid the relevant legal dues. The last time I heard of her via friends who do read the newspapers, she actually still embodies a 'joie de la vivre' philosophy which is uncommon for people from an academic background, especially judging from the long-term periods of unemployment for some or ad hoc adjunct or limited term employment stints.