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Wednesday, September 27, 2006
After some initial hesitancy, I'm back in the research groove. For the first time since my undergrad research terms I'm back to thinking about math things, with minimal other distractions, full time. It's great.
One thing I'm finding nice this time round is working on several problems at once. I find this really helpful for a number of reasons. If I get stuck on one problem, I look at a different one. Often, ideas from one problem help in others. Also, I'm finding it's helping me keep perspective on things - it's easy to get really frustrated if you get stuck on the same thing over and over again in the same problem. I was inspired to try looking at many different problem when reading an article about Terence Tao, the recent Field's medal winner, who said that doing that really helped him do research. By the way, he seems like he may be this century's first really great mathematician - he seems to have major contributions in most areas of mathematics; quite incredible really.
I'm planning on writing some more little mathematical expository things on my official website soon. There's so much beautiful mathematics out there; I'm excited to thinking about it all again.
One thing I'm finding nice this time round is working on several problems at once. I find this really helpful for a number of reasons. If I get stuck on one problem, I look at a different one. Often, ideas from one problem help in others. Also, I'm finding it's helping me keep perspective on things - it's easy to get really frustrated if you get stuck on the same thing over and over again in the same problem. I was inspired to try looking at many different problem when reading an article about Terence Tao, the recent Field's medal winner, who said that doing that really helped him do research. By the way, he seems like he may be this century's first really great mathematician - he seems to have major contributions in most areas of mathematics; quite incredible really.
I'm planning on writing some more little mathematical expository things on my official website soon. There's so much beautiful mathematics out there; I'm excited to thinking about it all again.
