Grantsmanship Revisited

An important addition to my earlier post on writing grant applications: there is a series of articles on science funding in Science Careers. The author is someone going — quite appropriately –  by the name of  Grant Doctor.

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The Top Ten Open Problems in Physics

A list by Dmitry Podolsky

Update: another such list (this time of 24 problems) by Sean Carroll, the three most important open problems in physics by the Nobel Prize winner Vitaly Ginzburg, and a more extensive list (see also the updated book version of this list)  by the same author.

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How Successful Mathematicians Work

I have found (hat tip: Yuri Kryakin)  a great interview in Russian with Ivan Panin, where he reminesces, inter alia, about his teacher, a prominent mathematician Andrei Suslin and the way he works.  The whole text is pretty long and very interesting but it is quite difficult to find reasonably self-contained excerpts to translate into English for those who don’t speak Russian, so let me give you just one bit as a teaser:

Suslin tackled the problems roughly as follows: first we see [the problem or the result to prove], then we believe [that we can solve it or that we can prove the result], and then we prove it. Because if you don’t believe, you will not have your vision materialized.

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The Most Important Quality for a Working Mathematician

According to Sir Michael Atiyah, the most important quality for a working mathematician is the ability to maintain concentration for a long time.  Via Konstantin Zuev (original post in Russian).

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