Miscellaneous stuff
This website was made using Org mode in Emacs, with a theme adapted from this. Background image from here.
LaTeX template for IISc PhD/M.Tech thesis: Click here to download (README.txt has instructions).
Academic
Graduate school
- “So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!” A graduate school survival guide.
- The PhD grind, an excellent memoir that describes what grad school is all about.
- An inspiring lecture by Richard Hamming, titled “You and your research”.
- Blog on how to succeed in research.
- Procrastination: On a lighter vein (also see this) and one with a more serious tone.
Writing:
- The Chicago manual of style
- Mathematical writing by Don Knuth, Tracy Larrabee and Paul Roberts.
- “How to write Mathematics” is an excellent article by Paul Halmos on writing articles or papers.
- Some advice on research and writing.
- Henning Schulzrinne has compiled some tips for writing papers, common writing bugs, and writing reviews. Some more resources here.
Other resources:
- Here are some useful resources by Richard Baraniuk.
- How to learn math and physics by John Baez. Also see his advice for the young scientist.
- Some musings by Micheal Steele here. Also see his advice on graduate research. Though it is for statistics students, it is nevertheless relevant for all grad students.
- Programming language research.
- Career advice by Terence Tao. Tao has an awesome blog where he has articles on Math, and even on writing and time management.
- Study hacks by Cal Newport on how to study, and the impact of devices and social media in everyday life.
- Advice by Ravi Vakil.
- An academic pensieve by Dror Bar-Natan.
- A quora post on What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics
- Huge collection of advice by Jason Eisner.
- Another huge collection of advice on research, giving presentations, technical writing, job hunting, etc.
- Reading for grad students by Matt Might.
- A reddit post: I’m not as smart as I thought I was.
- Teach yourself programming in 10 years, about expertise.
- “Ten lessons I wish I had been taught” by Gian-Carlo Rota.
- Taste for makers: An essay on beauty, taste, and good design.
How to read papers
- See this by Jason Eisner, and this paper by Keshav.
- Article on how to read a paper by Micheal Mitzenmacher, and another by Henning Schulzrinne.
Repetitive strain injury
- What is RSI?
- Article by Matt Might.
Presentations
On Teaching
- A mathematician’s lament by Paul Lockhart: A critique of school education.
- A scathing commentary on undergraduate math education by Morris Kline: Why the professor can’t teach: Mathematics and the dilemma of university education. Amazon link.
- Advice by John Baez.
Other links
- LyX is a software based on LaTeX. It is a useful WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) document preparation system and handy if you want to prepare professional presentations or reports but do not want to delve into the intricacies of LaTeX.
- The open directory project, a useful site to search for anything technical and non technical.
- An essay titled “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” by Richard Hamming.
- Lifehacker
Free ebooks (legal)
- A collection of classic ebooks, Project Gutenberg.
- World digital math library
- Digital mathematics library
- Archive.org
- Open library
- Freely available math lecture notes hosted by AMS.
Random stuff
Online courses and videos
- Coursera is a great place to learn new areas.
- So is edX and the MIT open courseware.
- Tutorials in information theory and coding: SP Coding school.
- Nexus of information and computation theories: a workshop held at IHP Paris.
- Some lectures at the Simons institute. Also see this for more.
- Theoretical CS videos at Princeton.
- TCS plus is an ongoing online seminar series in theoretical computer science (youtube). A similar series in information theory.
- Academic earth: A collection of courses from different sources.
- Open Yale courses.
- Ars Digita university.
- NPTEL: Lecture videos by professors in IIT’s and IISc.
- Videolectures.net.
- A collection of links to online math courses.
- A huge collection of online courses.
Tools
- A neat tool to clean and compress scanned handwritten notes.
- A tutorial on using the zstd compression library.