it either means that i've been thinking too much about maths or that i haven't been holding enough conversations with real people in physical reality ... or that i've been spending too many nights in the office:
wireless internet + procrastination + plenty of opinions → blog post.
today i read the printout of my thesis and started making corrections. after a while i was starting to lose patience with it, which is strange ..
.. after all, i wrote it.
but i'm done now .. at least i've done as much as i want to do with it. perhaps the saying is true: one is never finished with a mathematics paper; after a while, one just gives up.
now the supervisor can lose his patience with it. i've sent it off, and now it's time to write an introduction.
i had in mind to take a quasi-day-off from writing of any sort. you see, i don't know how to write an introduction, so i plan to spend a morning or afternoon leafing through the theses of others and seeing how theirs are like.
strange. this seems the way of all things i write, for the first time:
- i needed to see what a cover letter looked like before i drafted one of my own, for jobs.
- i needed to realise that my first research statement was awful before i could write a tolerable one, and that happened only after i browsed through the statements of others.
- i suspect i'll have to do the same, the first time a student will ask me for a letter of recommendation.
perhaps it's also too late for this sort of thing, but i also had in mind to read some literature on how to write mathematics. i know that there's an essay/paper by halmos, but to those of you out there:
can you recommend good reading, about how to write?
5 comments:
I don't know about good reading on how to write. I don't write that well, anyway.
One way to write an introduction: first, identify (1-3) results in the thesis that you like the most. Second, explain to a friendly algebraist* what these results mean and why you like them. Then write down what you said.
(*) Possibly, an imaginary friendly algebraist.
Hi Jasun -
Juha recommended to me Halmos' guide on writing mathematics. I've found it has some useful observations. You might try that for starters.
-Marie
ha ha. Serves me right for not reading your entire post carefully. I see you already know about Halmos' paper. =) Let me know if you find something you like better... I'd be interested in reading it.
=)
Marie
to L: i haven't read your work in a while, but i always felt that your writing was straightforward, and i liked it.
also, i took the imaginary friendly algebraist route. (:
to M: thanks for the tip anyway.
i am curious, though: do you know if Krantz's survival guide has any good tips for writing?
Section 4.6 is called "How do I write up my thesis?". There is also 7.1 "Should I publish my thesis?" and 8.4 "Publish of perish". So yes, go and take a look.
The author was kind enough to thank me on page xv on the preface. :)
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