[Calling it for this November, happy to have gotten a few short posts out.] For a couple years in my childhood, my mom picked up an obsession that can only be described as extreme couponing. At the…| Radimentary
Today I want to review a concept present in many domains, but most clearly articulated by TCG players. In a game like Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone, gameplay divides neatly into two phases: de…| Radimentary
Today I want to end this discussion about research collaboration with my most useful tip for grad students: build an explicit model of how collaborators work, especially your PhD advisor. One of yo…| Radimentary
Today we continue our discussion about research meetings with a few concrete strategies. When I was a new graduate student, I often had long meetings with my PhD advisor and other professors that w…| Radimentary
I once heard the following story about Szemerédi: His daughter was in elementary school at the time, and her teacher asked everyone to share a bit about their parents’ occupations. The kids w…| Radimentary
Last time we introduced the basic model of growth, which looks like this: The thesis is that noticeable growth is typically punctuated by a long intermediate period of low return on investment, whi…| Radimentary
[Followup to the previous post. I will likely collect and reorganize these shortforms once the month is over.] The narrative from the previous post outlines my basic model for how growth works. For…| Radimentary
In honor of NaNoWriMo, I’m joining a friend to write low-effort shortform blog posts every day this month. The first topic I’ll write about is what growth feels like, and where people h…| Radimentary
I. Prelude When my wife first started playing the wonderful action roguelike Hades, she got stuck in Asphodel. Most Hades levels involve dodging arrows, lobbed bombs, melee monsters, and spike trap…| Radimentary
[The first in a sequence of retrospective essays on my five years in math graduate school.] My favorite analogy for graduate school is the gravity turn: the maneuver a rocket performs to get from t…| Radimentary