Not Injective

We need to expose students to more than just the typical academic career path.

Competition

I’ve always found it tragic how research papers have to dress up what can be simple notions into some which are incredibly complex. At its core, the problem lies with finding good notation to express a given question or problem. Without this, the reader has to translate from opaque notation to the simple but informal arguments, which are easier to understand.

Pattern Recognition

I’ve always found these sentences in mathematics to be so lyrical. They almost want you to complete them in this way, even when we can get a little carried away.

Tip of the Iceberg

“Can you teach me everything you know?”

“Uh…that was it.”

Framing

If only I could make a “bubble of sound” around me…

Toy Model Regression

“Next: I can write a series of papers doing progressively more complicated perturbations and expansions.”

Numerical Instability

That platform is only balancing because I’ve had to tune the mass of that left sphere perfectly. It practically took a neural network to figure out the right mass.

Inspection

“Do you think you should maybe polish up this draft a bit for clarity?”

“What? This isn’t a draft! I spent a whole thirty minutes working on it. Everyone I want to understand this will be able to, and the others will just have to figure it out.”

Linear Theory

“So the size of the dots indicate your error bars?”

“Oh no, I only add those in when I’m really desperate.”

Ising

Most condensed matter research nowadays is just a list of footnotes to the Ising model.