

Advice to a Young Mathematician [pdf] - tokenadult
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/gowers/gowers_VIII_6.pdf

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mherdeg
If you like this stuff, recommend you read Hamming's "You and Your Research"
(<http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html>), which is
thought-provoking and approachable.

Ha, Sir Michael Atiyah's advice to a young mathematician includes a great
anecdote: ""J. E. Littlewood is reported to have set each of his research
students to work on a disguised version of the Riemann hypothesis, letting
them know what he had done only after six months. He argued that the student
would not have the conﬁdence to attack such a famous problem directly, but
might make progress if not told of the fame of his opponent! The policy may
not have led to a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, but it certainly led to
resilient and battle-hardened students"".

What a great story — sounds like it just leapt off the pages of the McSweeny's
list "Zen Parable or Just Someone Being Cruel?".

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jpdoctor
Sounds a little like the Dantzig story:
<http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp>

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eb007
love it... probably not intended but i found it fascinating how the
description of finding new ideas and approaches in mathematics (or any field
for that matter) is similar to that in startups. this part in particular
resonated

"If you keep asking yourself such questions when reading a paper or listening
to a lecture, then sooner or later a glimmer of an answer will emerge—some
possible route to investigate. When this happens to me I always take time out
to pursue the idea to see where it leads or whether it will stand up to
scrutiny. Nine times out of ten it turns out to be a blind alley, but
occasionally one strikes gold. The diﬃculty is in knowing when an idea that is
initially promising is in fact going nowhere. At this stage one has to cut
one’s losses and return to the main road. Often the decision is not clear-cut,
and in fact I frequently return to a previously discarded idea and give it
another try"

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elteto
I would like to archive this so that I can go back to it later, however I
can't seem to find the original work and scribd is holding it hostage asking
for a signup as ransom. Can anybody point me out to the source?

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tokenadult
_I would like to archive this so that I can go back to it later, however I
can't seem to find the original work and scribd is holding it hostage asking
for a signup as ransom._

The original source (Princeton University Press) URL

<http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/gowers/gowers_VIII_6.pdf>

appears if you mouse over the submission title here. I never read on scribd,
which always annoys me with usability issues like that. But, alas, any user of
HN who submits a .PDF link will find it automatically styled to also link to
scribd.

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lmm
Is there a userscript or anything for getting rid of the scribd links? I tried
to adblock but the markup is too simple to let it identify them.

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alter8
Why? They're not that large, just click the original title instead. I would
understand if you asked for a Google Cache replacement, though (I use a
bookmarklet for that).

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ph0rcyas
In the risk of being downvoted to death, I think reposting these articles is
necessary:

'Don't become a scientist!': <http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html>
'Women in science': <http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science>

The career for pure mathematicians(which is more like the humanities, and
specific knowledge quite untransferrable) in academia, being better or worse,
is open for discussion.

~~~
mitchi
Quite questionable examples. Most girls I know become
teachers/nurses/psychology/doctors and a few engineers. Zero in CS usually.
It's only about the money in the US because your diploma costs too much money
and you need to pay down your debt. His webpage only applies to the US, I'm
sure other countries like Russia have babes in Computer Science (See Golden
Eye).

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porter
There is so much good advice in here directly applicable to entrepreneurship!

