chutta

  A student once send me email asking me how one goes about doing research in   mathematics . I guess that one of the first thoughts that crossed my mind was, "Boy, did you ever ask the wrong person!" Doing research was for me never easy, and certainly not a thing that I ever thought I knew how to do. Aside from this, it seemed to me that this was like the perenniel question asked of science fiction writers (and in fact all writers): Where do you get your ideas? When asked this, Harlan Ellison used to respond that he would send a twenty dollar bill and a self-addressed stamped envelope to a certain address in Schenectady, and a few weeks later he would be sent an idea. Isaac Asimov used to say that he would get lots of ideas for stories while shaving. (Somehow I suspect that he did not use an electric razor.) I've never heard of any mathematicians who got their ideas by shaving. If there's any merit to this approach, it certainly puts women at a disadvantage. When Ein...