1) Roulez p'tit bolide

2) En avant, Guingamp

Your reply is very interesting and outlines the fact that one should not stop learning after school, but instead revisit past and new subjects with a different eye and different tools. Also motivation is the prime mover here.

Computer programming can be seen as more rigorous than mathematics because if the written program is not correct, the executable will not run; whereas a mathematical proof may contain elements that are not completely described but part of mathematical lore. However we do not possess a compiler for mathematics. Conversely language may be more abstract than mathematics because language, in addition to mathematics, may express information that is not mathematics, e.g. poetry, imagerie, etc. However mathematical abstraction is also very rigorous, which is not the case of poetry or other literary constructs.

Mathematics is unique in requiring both a high level of abstraction and rigour at the same time, yet this must be performed without any artificial help like a debugger or compilers. In addition, creative mathematics require a high level of intuition and the capacity to concentrate on a specific problem for long periods of time (months, sometimes). Altogether, mathematics requires specific talents that are fairly rare and not necessarily found in programmers or writers.

Fortunately we are not all alike.

Grant money is given preferably to teams that already publish a lot. Even "starting grants" in the EU require a single principal investigator (PI) with a lot of well-cited publication under their belt. This can only be achieved if the PI has done their initial research in a well-heeled lab, with a well-known head of the lab who is well-connected, and so on. This encourages a pyramidal structure with a lot of grunt students at the bottom, supervised by post-docs, supervised by assistant professors, and so on. Success encourages visibility, which encourages grants, which ensures money, which ensures good grunt students can be hired, and so on.

This is not the only possible successful structure, but one of the most common. A single researcher, however brilliant, cannot usually keep up with the outpouring of landmark papers the pyramidal structure can achieve. On the other hand, if everybody does their job, meritocracy in the pyramidal structure ensures that the best grunt students get promoted to post docs, and so on, usually in a different pyramidal structure.

The big drawback of the pyramidal structure is that the prof at the top usually doesn't know exactly what is going on at the bottom, even though they put their name on most of the papers that the structure produces.

Disclaimer: I'm a tenured prof. I do have a reasonable number of students, but I work with them directly. All my students are co-supervised with at least one other prof. Occasionally I do have a few post-docs but the structure is always collaborative. This is not the standard but this works well enough also as long as there isn't any ego-driven fights in the lab. This means choosing your collaborators well. I've made a few mistakes, but so far so good.

If you look at just about anybody's success story, the first thing that is of utmost importance is being in the right place at the right time. In other words, luck. The American dream has always been a dream. I'm not convinced that anything much has changed in the last 70 years about this, i.e. since about the end of WWII. Sure hard work is a factor but by no means the only one.

Not all libraries. OpenCV for instance.

Inefficient (two interpreters), inelegant (two syntaxes), and there is usually no point to it. Both languages are roughly as capable.

Only the really cheap stuff is particle board. They also have plenty of real wood stuff. What they really do well is the non-particle, real wood, cheap shelves like the Ivar brand. These are everywhere and there is essentially no alternative.

Only of those Europeans that have rich families. The European universities are full of European students too (and very few North Americans), usually the not-so-rich kind.

Most prestigious, most awash with money, yes. What befuddles me is why these super-rich universities don't simply select the very best students all over the world (including the US), and don't offer them affordable tuition. They would be even better. As of now, most US universities simply perpetuate a rich class divide.

The US to the rescue! the dream of all countries mired in anti-democratic squalor. If you look around the list of recently US-"liberated" countries, even as far back as the 1950s, it could perhaps bring you back to reality.Getting the US attention is more a curse than a blessing.

I'm sorry, citation needed. It does have compression and encryption, and you *can* make a RAID 0 or 1 with it, so it has some (weak) redundancy support, but I have never heard about it having deduplication. ZFS is the only filesystem I know that has deduplication.

As long as the US remains attractive for immigrants, you are correct, this is a life choice. However realize that population in any given country needs to be replaced. Having (too) many kids in Uganda do not compensate for the (dramatic) lack of kids in Japan. It's not a simple matter of shifting kids around, which is never simple to begin with.

So in short you may choose not to have children, but somebody will have to pay your pension eventually. It can help if this is someone you now well.

It is because it is a more complex issue that first thought.

Quadtree are an approximation technique widely used in imaging and computational geometry. Did you look on Google Scholar/Web of Science or just in patents?

A light search returned these links:

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-47789-6_106 (sorry paywalled)

https://diglib.eg.org/EG/DL/Conf/EG2002/short/short90.pdf

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for. In discrete geometry (construction of a Voronoi tessellation on pixel data), it is often more efficient to used an Euclidean distance function, which is linear. Indeed constructing the quadtree plus using it for the computation takes more time.