Category: Career Advice
-
The Microscope and the Telescope: A Defensive Lineman’s Advice for Mathematicians
Maxx Crosby, the Raiders’ star pass rusher, described his approach to his career in a 2024 interview with Sports Illustrated using a metaphor that’s stuck with me. He credits it to two of his former coaches, Rich Bisaccia and Rod Marinelli: The microscope’s your day-to-day; your 99% of the time, you’re in today. All you’re…
-
The Complete Guide to Losing the Academic Mathematics Metagame
A comprehensive manual for sabotaging your own mathematical career Every game has a metagame, the game about the game, the optimal strategies for winning at a specific point in time. Academic mathematics is no exception. While most career advice tells you how to succeed, I’m going to do something different: show you exactly how to…
-
You Can Tolerate Almost Anything. That’s the Problem.
The Years That Are Fine It’s not the disasters that take mathematicians out. It’s the years that are fine. The advisor isn’t bad, just not generative. The thesis problem isn’t intractable, just not exciting. The paper isn’t rejected, it’s stuck in a fourth round of revisions. The postdoc isn’t failing, it’s just extending into year…
-
Borrowed Confidence, Earned Belief
Fake it, do it, make it: a mathematician’s path through impostor syndrome. I cannot tell you when it happened. There was no single moment, no paper accepted, no problem solved, no email from a senior colleague that flipped a switch. What I noticed, eventually, was that conversations had changed. My advisor would pause longer when…
-
The Missing Dimensions
The first time you really understood a proof, you probably weren’t reading it. You were in the middle of something else, your own problem, your own mess of ideas, when the technique you’d read about three months earlier suddenly clicked into place. Not because you’d finally memorized it, but because you needed it. The stopping…
-
The infrastructure of good work: systems and processes for mathematical careers
For graduate students, postdocs, and early-career mathematicians It’s 11 PM and you’re staring at a reviewer comment asking about the non-compact case. You know you thought about this six months ago. You remember a conversation with your collaborator, something about a cutoff argument, or maybe it was a different approach entirely, but the notes from…
-
Minor Revisions
A single peer review decision, seen from four angles, and what it says about a process that is slow, imperfect, and usually right. The email arrives on a Tuesday afternoon. You’ve spent three months revising. You addressed every point, the notation, the exposition, the logical gap flagged in section three. You submitted again. You were…
-
The White Whale: On Finding the Problem That Hunts You Back
A letter to graduate students, postdocs, and mathematicians at every stage, on obsession, identity, and the problem you cannot let go. “To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) Somewhere in your mathematical life,…
-
When Everything Becomes a Crab: The Strange Phenomenon of Convergent Evolution in Nature, Mathematics, and Human Systems
The Crab at the End of the Universe There’s a running joke among evolutionary biologists that given enough time, everything wants to become a crab. This isn’t entirely hyperbole, at least five separate groups of crustaceans have independently evolved into crab-like forms over millions of years. This phenomenon, called carcinization, has become something of an…
-
Give Me a Lever Long Enough
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” —Archimedes Archimedes was talking about physics, but academics have always understood the metaphor intuitively. We speak of “high-leverage activities,” of people who “punch above their weight,” of the importance of “strategic positioning.” We recognize that…