Viewing profile — aardvarks

When I was trying to choose a PhD supervisor one of the things I did was read through recent grads' acknowledgments. While no one ever mentioned their advisor with anything but gra…

It's true that professors rely on grad students/postdocs to do work. And, at least in my experience, advisors are actually pretty good about giving students credit for their work -…

Just having the good new ideas isn't really enough, though. You have to be really persistent about figuring out all the details and making them work. This is related to, but defini…

So I'm totally on board with everyone knowing something about the liberal arts and trying to expand your world outside your traditional scope. But I think "understanding" can mean …

Nice article! I guess it's obvious in retrospect, but I hadn't known of all the systematized study devoted to this topic. I'm happy to learn about it because I've found myself thin…

Actually, even the first two tables comparing the frequency of 1,2,3,4,5,6 when obtained using primes vs. a fair die suggest that consecutive primes do not give a truly random (unc…

He would sometimes eat lunch with us postdocs (just randomly, on a whim) when I was a postdoc at IAS. He would always have something interesting to say or ask, generally about scie…

There is a parallel with one of pg's other essays, 'Why nerds are unpopular'[1]. He says (I paraphrase): 'nerds care more about being smart than being popular'. But that's another …

As of earlier today you could still follow links from WSJ social media, for example their official twitter feeds, and get access to the whole article. Any way to set that up as a l…

Rota was quite the celebrity, at least among students. In addition to advanced classes in his specialty, he taught differential equations, which was required for at least two third…

That's a pretty good 3-sentence summary - reflects my experience as well. To expand a bit...it's not that nearly everyone doesn't start out super excited about their subjects and m…

Agreed, it can sometimes be exhausting. But I think being kind is (to be rather mercenary) very practical also: I've found it is much easier to get people to listen to and go along…

What ivy league and other private research universities excel at academically is scholarly opportunities outside class assignments. This is actually true at any school. At large st…

I'm an academic - have worked at a variety of institutions but never officially been at an ivy league school, so I can't strictly speaking claim ground truth. But my impressions ar…