from Hacker News

Yitang Zhang, 2014 MacArthur Fellow

by jamesli on 9/17/14, 4:19 AM with 11 comments

• by jessriedel on 9/17/14, 2:00 PM

  Yitang Zhang has an incredibly inspiring academic story of perseverance and passion in the face of adversity:

  > After graduation, Zhang had a hard time finding an academic position...He managed to find a position as a lecturer after many years, at the University of New Hampshire, where he was hired by Kenneth Appel back in 1999. Prior to getting back to academia, he worked for several years as an accountant and a delivery worker for a New York City restaurant. He also worked in a motel in Kentucky and in a Subway sandwich shop.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang

  (UNH is ranked #108 in math nationwide.) I highly recommend that article in Quanta:

  http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130519-unheralded-m...

• by codemac on 9/17/14, 4:37 PM

  You know academics is a bit fucked when someone being anointed a MacArthur fellow was a "lecturer" at UNH from 1999 until being promoted to "professor" in January of 2014! The plus side being someone like Mr. Zhang gets to stay working on interesting academic problems.

  I know several people getting their PhD, lecturing, and assistent professors.. but I only know one person on a tenure "track" and they want desperately to quit. We as a society have got to figure out how to incept public research institutions.

• by matthewwiese on 9/17/14, 1:56 PM

  I love that articles relevant in mathematics gets posted to HN, it just makes me giddy.

  Also, that note on a possible application in crypto makes sense to my amateur brain.

• by ww520 on 9/17/14, 6:14 PM

  Pure math is interesting. The research topics are often out of the left field and have no bearing on any current application. How do people pick research topics that can't be seen useful for a long time?

  Kudos to Zhang for his perseverance.

• by ausjke on 9/17/14, 4:03 PM

  I read this a while ago but am happy to find new links in this post, what a great story! Printed it out for my kids to read too.

• by mgulaid on 9/17/14, 4:59 PM

  What an inspiring story...