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Results tagged with soft-question
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user 11260
Questions that are about research in mathematics, or about the job of a research mathematician, without being mathematical problems or statements in the strictest sense. Do not use this tag for easy or supposedly easy mathematical questions.
142
votes
How can a mathematician handle the pressure to discover something new?
The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was in a similar state of mind, he referred to it as a "burn-out" feeling: Now that he had landed the University professorship he had strived for, he felt the …
114
votes
Are there any serious investigations of whether "mathematicians do their best work when they...
These two studies arrive at what seems to be a more sensible conclusion:
Age and Scientific Performance, Stephen Cole (1976).
The long-standing belief that age is negatively associated with scien …
114
votes
PhD dissertations that solve an established open problem
I find George Dantzig's story particularly impressive and inspiring.
While he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, near the beginning of
a class for which Dantzig was late, professor Jerzy Ney …
93
votes
What are some noteworthy "mic-drop" moments in math?
The best known lower bound for the minimal length of superpermutations was originally posted anonymously to 4chan.
The story is told at Mystery Math Whiz and Novelist Advance Permutation Problem, and …
84
votes
Accepted
What’s the etiquette on using diagrams that need color to be understood?
The concern with color figures for grey scale printing is less of an issue these days, when pretty much all displays are in color, so the reader can always check which color is which even if the docum …
82
votes
Note rejected from arXiv: what to do next?
Q1: The arXiv moderation procedure is described here; as you can read, "unrefereeable content" is a placeholder for a paper "in need of significant review and revision". Unlike refereeing, which has a …
61
votes
Research-only permanent positions worldwide
In the US, you could try to follow in the footsteps of Gödel and land a job at the Institute for Advanced Study.
But do keep in mind what Richard Feynman thought about such research positions without …
49
votes
On critical reviews of Hawking's lecture "Gödel and the end of the universe"
Alon Amit: "There are some things that break my heart more thoroughly than reading nonsensical conclusions from Gödel's Theorems to the limitations of physics published by eminent scientists, but the …
- 188k
48
votes
Is a come back to mathematical research possible?
Alice Roth became a mathematics teacher after her Ph.D. in 1938, and only returned to research after her retirement in 1971. Her 1976 paper on the "fusion lemma" is said to have "influenced a new gene …
47
votes
Examples of creative experiments by mathematicians in modern days
I am encouraged to give this answer by the comment of the OP "My interest is in creative, non-digital ways of experimenting with mathematical theories, especially aiming for publication".
My colleague …
43
votes
Mathematically interesting screensavers
This particular screensaver did not just nicely illustrate math, it actually motivated research:
A Tisket, a Tasket, an Apollonian Gasket, Dana Mackenzie
In the spring of 2007 I had the good for …
43
votes
Publishing conjectures
If you have numerical evidence in support of the conjecture, the journal of Experimental Mathematics seems to fit the bill:
Experimental Mathematics publishes original papers featuring formal
re …
43
votes
What percentage of published mathematics papers are correct?
This graph from Errors and Corrections in Mathematics Literature indicates about 1.4% of published mathematics papers were followed by a correction.
Corrections as percent of journal documents f …
- 188k
42
votes
Accepted
Revisiting the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
A 2013 issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews was entirely devoted to this topic. One viewpoint, by Jesper Lützen, struck me:
When Wigner claimed that the effectiveness of mathematics in the
natu …
39
votes
What was Hilbert's view of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems?
The reaction of Hilbert to Gödel is described in detail by Solomon Feferman in Gödel on finitism, constructivity and Hilbert’s program (2011).
Hilbert was unaffected by any of the reconsiderations of …
- 188k