alt Hacker NewsRight. With a college degree, I understand most of these words. I don’t have a clue about the impact of the research or how it fits into the corpus, but I understand the gist of the article title.
Despite my degree being in engineering, which involved 4 semesters of calculus, and 3 other semesters of math, (7 total) I have absolutely no fucking clue what’s going on in the Fields Medal description above. It’s only barely more intelligible than if it had been written in Chinese (which I truly cannot read at all).
I genuinely don’t understand it at all. Even words that I think I recognize like “harmonic” or “geometric” are useless to me because the actual terms are “harmonic analysis” and “geometric measure theory” and I have 0% clue what those are.
I don’t have to google any of the words in the example biology title.
Did your 7 semesters of calculus include any courses that a math major would take?
For example, a single upper-division undergrad level course on probability will expose you to measure theory.
Similarly, harmonic analysis is something that you can take as a reasonably good senior in mathematics.