Pointers

Research how-tos:

• Mathematical Writing, Don Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul Roberts
• Anupam Gupta’s advice on giving talks

  (related: slides from a talk of mine, and great examples from Dan, John, Tim, Mary, and Ryan)

• Reviewing principles from Nicole Immorlica (slides, notes)

  (related: Tim Roughgarden’s notes on reading papers)

• How to Be a Mathematician (or Theoretical Computer Scientist), Ryan O’Donnell

  (videos: How to do CS Theory and Street Fighting Mathematics)

• How to do theoretical research, Ankur Moitra

Advice I often come back to:

• Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught, Gian-Carlo Rota
• The Three Golden Rules for Successful Scientific Research, Edsger W. Dijkstra
• You and Your Research, Richard Hamming
• Advice-sharing project from the Stanford Theory Dish

Miscellaneous pointers:

• George Forsythe and the Development of Computer Science, Don Knuth
• Terry Tao’s proof of Arrow’s Theorem
• George Pólya teaching us how to guess (and how to teach)

Like many others, I have found adapting to doing theory research in the new era challenging and fraught with existential dread. These are some essays that I found inspiring and motivating:

• If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it, Grant Sanderson
• The Big Reset in Mathematics, Daniel Spielman
• Speeding Up the Process of Mourning, Omer Reingold
• We’re gonna need a lot more mathematicians, Amit Sahai