What kind of IQ does it take to be a physicist/mathematician?

I mean in order to be a working ( and at least somewhat productive ) ant in a research field. Where is the cut off line?

 

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Speaking as one myself I don't think IQ is a very good measure. The sorts of questions asked in those tests are not aligned in a good way with mathematical aptitude. Sure there's the "What is the next number?" and simple logic questions but they are not representative of the sorts of problems mathematicians and physicists work with in reality.

You need to be pretty good at maths, be you a mathematician (obviously) or a physicist and especially so if you go into theoretical physics which can be more mathematical than some mathematics! There is a surprising spread of capabilities in academia. The top people will have cruised to the top grades in school but there's also academics who were consistent B students in high school, some universities have both lower standards of student and academic compared to the top universities. Personally I'm of the opinion that if you're not getting the top grades in school then don't think about a profession in maths/physics because it only gets harder when you go to university and the industry is pretty cut throat when it comes to getting your foot in the academic door.

Some of the aforementioned less than stellar academics get their jobs through pure hardwork, in that they'll produce a lot of material even if it isn't going to be terribly note worthy. In chemistry, biology and large areas of physics there's an awful lot of experiments to be done and so someone can make large contributions to those areas even if they aren't the best at developing models to explain their results (I'm not saying all experimentalists are poor, I'm saying a poor theoretician can still make contributions if they focus themselves properly). Sometimes someone who is mediocre but hard working can be more valuable and productive than someone whose amazing but has terrible work ethic.

This can apply even in mathematics. Some people do entire PhDs on just churning through thousands of different cases of some result to check them all for some property. That sort of research needs to be done but it doesn't require the most creative mathematician in the world to do. This is the 'maths monkey' status some academics give their students, the academic isn't going to waste time trying 500 different cases of the same basic result, it's palmed off to the student.

If you're considering the sorts of stuff done by the more well known scientists, like Hawking or Witten, then you're into the realms of people in the top 0.01% of their professions, literally the best people in the country for their subjects.

 

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Jettison the IQ metric. The professional physics community neither inquires about nor gives a damn about IQ scores. You have to be reasonably bright, passionate, and dedicated. An aptitude for mathematics and the ability to think outside the box are also valuable assets/atributes.

 

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Sorry, but I couldn't resist. Obviously, good grammar/spelling is not required.

who's -- not whose

 

I actually corrected that elsewhere in my post but didn't notice the mistake happened elsewhere. Besides my papers are the result of a bit more time than my posts. Also, you are hardly a good example of what it takes to be a scientist Walter. What you have put forth in the past is much much worse than a mental slip up done early on a Sunday morning.

 

I agree . . . . OOB (Out-Of-the-Box; your outside the box) is particularly important in envisioning beyond the status quo . . . regardless of IQ (I'm assuming this is Intelligence Quotient and not Ignorance Quotient!) (<--humor here)

 

a mathematical IQ

the ability to understand how to put a problem into symbolic number representation , in what order , multiply , add , subtract or divide and why

 

This is a surprisingly rare ability, even among mathematicians. At the place I work we require a PhD to apply for a job and the majority of people who come for interview struggle to convert a wordy description of a problem into proper mathematical formalism. We had one guy complain that the (obfuscated) real world problem we gave him wasn't formalised enough. Hello?! That's how the real world works! Someone comes to you with a problem in the form of "We have this big system with all these little things and we don't understand why it does this funny behaviour!", not "We can't solve this differential equation".

If you want to just do pure mathematics then converting wordy problems into mathematics isn't terribly necessary but if you're doing any kind of physics related to experiments or the real world then you should be able to do that.

It's surprising how many people struggle with which amounts to little more than an application of Newtonian mechanics or just enumerating all the contributions, like a ball moving around a rough spinning bowl. Some don't even think to draw a picture to help them.

Oh and one thing Fraggle brought up, you've got to want to do it. If you want to be a PhD then you have to really want to do it. As I said, you don't have to be the top of the top but you have to be into it enough that you can be left to your own devices for YEARS and still end up working. If you're the sort of person who thinks "No one is going to ask what work I've done today, I'll play on my X box instead!" then perhaps it isn't for you. My supervisor was a very bad supervisor, I don't think she read any of my work, nothing in my thesis was the result of talking to her nor did she really help at all. If I hadn't been the sort of person to work 6~10 hours a day off my own back (weekends included) because I loved the subject then I wouldn't have got a PhD, she was that bad. Some supervisors will hold your hand, either because they are directly involved or they give a shit about you or they don't want to have a failed student on their record, others consider having students almost a punishment and don't care. If you don't love a subject enough to be willing to do it, if necessary, 10 hours a day every day for years off your own back then you might get half way through a PhD, realise you're sick to your back teeth of a subject you don't care about and you pack it in, wasting a few years of your life.

I know plenty of genius people (getting top grades at top universities without effort) who didn't have much drive. I know some people with PhDs who have terrible attitudes to work and only got through their PhDs because places like top universities will put up with a genius being a dick because they are a genius. Since most people aren't so brilliant people will put up with their shit regardless it's important to be vaguely well rounded, willing to put in lots of effort and be able to communicate your thoughts clearly.

I'm sure some people here might find it a shock but in real life I generally come across as sane, level headed and coherent. And only sometimes an arrogant jerk (usually when it's Friday and it's been a long week and someone is WRONG

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)

 

What is going on with all those wrong people on the Internet?
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=39261 ( OP claims 2 of Maxwell's equations are wrong on the basis of personal distaste )

 

During my undergrad I had to do some C programming as part of coursework and during my PhD I did some Mathematica and Singular (it's an algebraic geometry language/program) but if I'd been doing something slightly different or was cocky enough not to bother with coursework (the top top people sometimes don't 'waste' their time with it!) I could have quite easily spent 8 years at university doing mathematics and physics and never needed to type a single letter of code! Now I write tons of it, though I am not deluded into thinking I'm anywhere near to the level of a programmer but still tons more than I would have done if I stayed in academia.

In some of our interview questions we'll ask open ended questions which don't so much have a solution as a procedure of investigation and we'll specifically ask the candidate to outline the sequence of steps they might do. Too few really get their head around such an approach and most of them have a more physics based background. It harkens back to my previous post, where often a mathematician will expect something to be well formalised and there a definite solution to exist. It's rare to get such things in real world problems.

My mother always used to correct myself and my sister when we said things like "I got it for free", it's "I got it free" or "I got it for nothing", you didn't give someone 'free' in exchange for the item or service, you gave them nothing or it was free! Now I grit my teeth when I hear even nation BBC radio using "You can get the concert tickets for free!". Oh BBC, whatever happened to you.....

And the cartoon you're referring to is an XKCD one.

 

Apparently you only read quite narrowly. I have posted in hundreds of threads on several score scientific topics over the course of the past half-dozen years. I don't believe you've shed a bit of light on much of any of those posts except for one very narrow field pertaining to the LHC. Where are your posts in the scores of threads in which I've written showing some error? You are, of course, up (down) to your usual standard of arrogance.

 

Mod note: Walter L. Wagner has received a warning for flaming.

 

As long as you are not clinically retarded, you should be fine.

 

Since leaving academia 2 years ago I've done a much much broader amount of mathematics and physics than I ever would have staying on as a postdoc somewhere.

A demonstrable lie. I rarely talk about the LHC. Experimental physics is not my thing, nor was any of my academic work related to the LHC. I've engaged in discussions on the LHC with you but that's because you're one of the main LHC doom sayers.

Recent threads I've made or have contributed to have covered things like the Dirac equation, chemical dynamics, Fokker Planck equation, probability, ring theory, number theory, machine learning and various relativity topics. And that's just checking the first page of my recent posts!

And many of the things I just mentioned I've also done research work on, mostly since leaving academia. Your summary of contributions used the word 'threads'. It shows the different level you're operating at if you measure your level by the number of threads you make on a subject rather than the amount of research you've done, which is what this thread is about.

My original comment at you had in mind your The Daily Show appearance, where you demonstrated a grasp of probability so shockingly poor that it makes your "Looks like you don't know the difference between whose and who is!" comment laughably hypocritical. A basic understanding of probability is important in experimental physics because it's how you quantify discoveries, like whether or not a new particle has been observed or it is just happen-stance.

This topic was about how someone makes contributions to research. As such you have little to no experience. The one contribution you might have made was working as a lab tech, which didn't require you to know anything of the underlying physics (which you don't), you were just employed to do visual pattern recognition on data and then take any candidates to those higher up who did know the science.

Believe me, if you want to play the "Who reads the widest and who has done the most" game you shouldn't try it on a forum populated with physicists and mathematicians. Not with your track record.....

 

After some 11 - odd years at university studying soft stuff - arts, music, psychology, history and the like, I decided that I needed to learn somewhat about computers, robots, physics and chemistry, so I went to get into some basic science courses.

There was a little mathematics "placement exam" they made me take before letting me register for any of that fun stuff. I bombed that exam quite badly.

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The counselor told me that a performance that low on the math placement meant I was likely not going to be able to pass any of the basic courses in those fields and I should just hang it up or go elsewhere. I had placed into Algebra 1, so I ignored his advice and signed up for that class. Aced that sukka too, went on to trig. Ditto. Then I went on, and I picked up those other field's courses on the way through math grad school.

Yeah, I am one of those plodding mathematicians who must do a lot more work just to achieve relatively mundane results in most topic areas.....

...excepting plane and space tilings. I found my topic after 14 years of mathematics and am still having a great time with it. I very much enjoy crystal lattices and the physics of crystalline solids, quasiperiodic plane & space tilings and fractal geometry. Heck, I even get paid for that sometimes.

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IQ is a highly debatable topic and probably not as relevant as one might think.

 

You seem to have entirely misunderstood what I wrote.

I said that YOU have not posted in most of the threads in which I have posted, and that those threads in which I post have, for the most part, not been related to the LHC. For most of the threads in which I have shown a strong command of science, you've simply not bothered to post. Check with Hercules Rockefeller. I'm sure he'll confirm that you seldom, if ever, post in any of the fields of biology, which is far broader in scope than the LHC. The only threads in which you and I have both posted frequently has been, for the most part, related to the LHC, which is in a 'narrow' field of interest which even you acknowledge is not your cup of tea.

 

And where is the warning to AN for his flaming in post #6?