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Mathematicians work a lot and are usually inspired by many things. In their lifetimes they get to publish only portions of their results. There have been stories of how Gauss, Euler, Ramanujan, Einstein, Hilbert etc kept notebooks and in it we can find glimpses to their thought processes and glimpses to results they did not publish and nevertheless would have turned to be important if in fact they had done. These are known classical examples.

  1. Are there notable example of recent mathematicians who kept such notebooks?

  2. I find lot of mathematicians have blogs but these are on published results. Do mathematicians still have such notebooks and if so when do they transfer their results usually to their notebooks and when do they transfer such results to publication (in other words I am asking for organizing principles for organizing thought processes and progress)?

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    $\begingroup$ Since publications are only distillations of parts of our work, we do need to save all of our work somewhere. In the old days, we did this in paper notebooks or pads, and I'm sure many mathematicians still do. Others prefer to type them up in LaTeX. I do this, so I have a git repository containing all of my math work. $\endgroup$
    – Deane Yang
    Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 1:25
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    $\begingroup$ Quillen's notebooks were put online a few years ago: claymath.org/publications/quillen-notebooks $\endgroup$
    – Dan Ramras
    Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 2:05
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    $\begingroup$ I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum from Deane: I keep nothing except occasionally a pile of scratch paper related to the most current project. If I accidentally stumble upon a new idea worth remembering, I usually merely try to remember it. Part of it is a decent memory that started to fail me only after 50 and part of it is a clear understanding that I'm no Gauss or Euler, so I'd better be rather restrictive in choosing when to add my voice to the choir unless I want just to increase the noise component in the music. :-) $\endgroup$
    – fedja
    Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 2:18
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    $\begingroup$ I am a disaster in this respect. Have a folder called worktex where I start some tex file every time something in my head manages to attract my attention. The result is above 1 gb, almost 30 folders with some of them having up to 10 subfolders, and if I pick something at random, as a rule I can make no more sense out of it than of some dream I might have one of the nights from that time. Moral: only keep notebooks if you really know what you are doing. $\endgroup$
    – მამუკა ჯიბლაძე
    Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 5:40
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    $\begingroup$ Although the question "How do you keep your research notes organized?" was asked 11 years ago, the answers may nevertheless prove insightful. See mathoverflow.net/q/1785/965. $\endgroup$
    – grshutt
    Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 8:24

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  1. Yes, mathematicians keep notebooks. Sometimes, after their death, notebooks are published. Here is an example: http://www.claymath.org/publications/quillen-notebooks

Here is another example, though not so recent: https://www.math.uu.se/collaboration/beurling/unpublished-manuscripts/

I believe many mathematicians have a lot of unpublished stuff. Sometimes their friends and students publish this after their death, exactly as it happened in the past.

  1. Mathematicians discuss on their blogs and web pages not only published results. There are many examples. Much material exists in the form of correspondence, lecture notes, and preprints which are not officially made public (not available to everyone, like blogs) and which mathematicians share among their colleagues.
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