TITLE: What It Feels Like To Do Research
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 06, 2015  3:11 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
In one sentence:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Unless you tackle a problem that's already solved, which is
 boring, or one whose solution is clear from the beginning,
 mostly you are stuck.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

This is from Alec Wilkinson's
<A HREF="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/pursuit-beauty">
   The Pursuit of Beauty</A>,
about mathematician Yitang Zhang, who worked a decade on the
problem of bounded gaps between prime numbers.  As another
researcher says in the article,

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 When you try to prove a theorem, you can almost be totally
 lost to knowing exactly where you want to go.  Often, when
 you find your way, it happens in a moment, then you live
 to do it again.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Programmers get used to
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2014-10.html#e2014-10-16T15_54_01.htm">
   never feeling normal</A>,
but tackling the twin prime problem is on a different level
altogether.  The same is true for any deep open question in
math or computing.

I strongly recommend Wilkinson's article.  It describes what
life for untenured mathematicians is like, and how a single
researcher can manage to solve an important problem.
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