- 12 Mar 2019 16:02
#14993442
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/20 ... story.html
A man threatened to sue the mathematician for using his photo without permission but it turned out that the photo was not of the plaintiff, it was of another similar-looking man.
It's a very interesting subject and while the psychological implications are interesting, I appreciate that it was done with an observational study so that it would be harder to nitpick through.
A man threatened to sue the mathematician for using his photo without permission but it turned out that the photo was not of the plaintiff, it was of another similar-looking man.
You can spot a nonconformist a mile away. Because they all look alike. Just ask mathematician Jonathan Touboul, an associate professor at Brandeis University.
Like the rest of us, Touboul has noticed that people who strive to look different usually end up looking the same. He’s even given it a name: “the hipster effect.” But Touboul has gone one step further, by coming up with a mathematical explanation for why it happens.
Touboul’s dense, bewildering paper on the hipster effect has made him a celebrity in the abstruse world of higher math. And the premise of his work was ironically confirmed when it was written up on MIT Technology Review, a website run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A reader of the review article threatened to sue, claiming that his photo had been used without permission to illustrate the story. Only it wasn’t the reader’s photo, but a generic image of a plaid-shirted, bearded hipster purchased from a stock-photo agency.
It's a very interesting subject and while the psychological implications are interesting, I appreciate that it was done with an observational study so that it would be harder to nitpick through.
Orb Team Re-Assemble!
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