Timeline for How to read an article and make it actually useful?
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| May 26, 2022 at 16:41 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @fedja What you say is fair. After re-reading your answer, I think that my main objection is that you downplay your own personal approach as being the product of "laziness" and hold up Bourgain as the ideal. In fact, I think your own approach has much to recommend it, and Bourgain's approach may be appropriate only for a select few. | |
| May 26, 2022 at 15:57 | comment | added | Hollis Williams | There is no straight answer to this question as everyone is different. The ''reading lots of papers quickly'' style is good for people who can assimilate and remember a large amount of information and then immediately think of extensions and ways to develop the existing results. | |
| May 26, 2022 at 15:39 | comment | added | fedja | @TimothyChow You want to prove a theorem using whatever technique is available while I want to sharpen a technique with whatever theorem it can work on. We have very different approaches and attitudes and I believe I mentioned it in my post that one should follow an advice from someone with similar attitudes. As to the statement that "you are not Jean Bourgain", I sort of tried to explain why. There may be, of course, more to "becoming a Bourgain" than just reading in this style, but that part is a necessary component (IMHO). | |
| May 26, 2022 at 15:33 | comment | added | fedja | @TimothyChow "Reading a few papers carefully makes sense, but how do you pick what to focus on?" I guess I addressed exactly that point: pick up anything that you can understand and at least partially figure out yourself at the current stage at random without asking why. The more diversity, the better. Your primary approach seems to be "choose a problem to work on and acquire the tools relevant to it ignoring the rest for now". Mine is "build a set of tools acquiring whatever can be grabbed from any source and try to solve at every moment all you can solve with them". | |
| May 26, 2022 at 14:03 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | To me, this sounds like a recipe for how not to approach reading papers. I'm no Jean Bourgain, so why should I expect that what worked for him will work for me? The Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps reportedly consumed 10,000 calories of food a day. So if I want his physique, should I consume 10,000 calories of food a day? Advice of the form, "Do as I say, not as I do" always sounds suspect. Jean Bourgain may have been able to improve on any paper he picked up, but for mere mortals, different advice may apply. Reading a few papers carefully makes sense, but how do you pick what to focus on? | |
| S May 25, 2022 at 23:40 | history | answered | fedja | CC BY-SA 4.0 | |
| S May 25, 2022 at 23:40 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by fedja |