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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.

11 votes

Publishing corollaries of previously published results

In general, the rule is that one may (but not necessarily should) publish everything he/she considers worth attracting people's attention to (under the condition that their attention is not there alre …
fedja's user avatar
  • 61.9k
34 votes

What is the oldest open math problem outside of number theory?

I don't have a 200 year old candidate but I can offer a 150 year old one (from Maxwell's "Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" written in 1873). You are allowed to put $n$ electric point charges in …
fedja's user avatar
  • 61.9k
12 votes

Do mathematicians rely on senses other than vision and hearing?

I cannot tell what opinion the neuroscience holds here, i.e., if you do a brain scan of a person trying to read a mathematical text or solve a problem, and then compare it with the scan of a person tr …
fedja's user avatar
  • 61.9k
11 votes

What is an important mathematical question?

Gil gave you an excellent answer already. I'll just add a small piece of advice: when you hear that somebody says that a certain open problem/question is worth studying, add 1 point to the problem sco …
fedja's user avatar
  • 61.9k
16 votes

What should one do before submitting a paper?

First of all, proofread it several times. Remember that every minor mistake that will take you five minutes to correct may perplex the reader for several hours, so aim at minimizing the community time …
fedja's user avatar
  • 61.9k
22 votes

How to read an article and make it actually useful?

As to reading, I usually give people the advice of how to become an equivalent of Jean Bourgain (I'm too old now and has always been too lazy to follow it myself, but I'm pretty sure it is robust). Ta …
fedja's user avatar
  • 61.9k
5 votes

Math videos containing real time rough thinking

I feel that after what I said I should offer something constructive here as well. Part of the problem with such movies is that the very act of verbalizing the thought process interferes with it quite …
fedja's user avatar
  • 61.9k
4 votes

Is physical stamina important for doing mathematics?

Apparently this is one of those opinion-based questions that are destined to be closed soon. Still, I'll share my perspective. IMHO it doesn't matter at all (for doing mathematics, at least) if you ca …
fedja's user avatar
  • 61.9k
20 votes

What is the point of reading classics over modern treatments?

IMHO, everything depends on how the classical text (C) and modern text (M) are written. I will not talk about "archaic terminology", "outdated notation", etc. One skill that one has to acquire as earl …
Greg Martin's user avatar
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12 votes

Explaining the main ideas of proof before giving details

I honestly just don't know. Of course, including anything that can be skipped but can, in principle, help at least someone into the paper cannot be "bad", so the question is rather whether it is pract …
fedja's user avatar
  • 61.9k
20 votes

When to publish minor results?

I'm in somewhat similar position too. My attitude is that most time people know why they are asking for some particular result so it is their headache to convert it into "public good" and to "spread t …
fedja's user avatar
  • 61.9k
6 votes

What are transport, diffusion, dispersion, dissipation, and viscosity terms in a PDE exactly?

"Transport" is easy: if you think of some distribution of mass $f$ that is moving at some velocity $v$ (which may be constant or point/time-dependent), then the equation for the (varying) mass density …
fedja's user avatar
  • 61.9k
70 votes

What are some deep theorems, and why are they considered deep?

There are many possible meanings of word "deep" one can detect in the common speech. I'll list three good and three bad but I do not pretend the list is anywhere near complete. 1) Very difficult (Fer …
Community's user avatar
  • 1
72 votes

How do you not forget old math?

You do forget things you are not working on. Nothing can be done about it. I could read German easily by the end of 8th grade and now I can hardly spell "Entshuldigen Sie mir bitte". There are several …
fedja's user avatar
  • 61.9k
46 votes
Accepted

Papers better than books?

Very recently I and Misha Sodin had a strong incentive to learn the Ito-Nisio lemma (which, roughly speaking, says that weak convergence in probability of a series of symmetric independent random vari …
fedja's user avatar
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