By Laura Zirbel

Last month, I wrote about how to get and read papers from the arXiv in Google Reader. Now that we have all these papers, and have filtered out the ones we want to read, how do we go about it? Assuming I’m not printing every paper that passes my way, I’m breaking this question down into two parts:

• How do you sort and store your papers?
• How do you read your papers?

Ideally, I would love to have a program that does both (and does both well)… alas, I haven’t found the holy grail. Continue reading →

By Melanie Laffin

We have all heard the analogy of how we, as humans, are a fraction of a speck of dust with regard to the vastness of the universe. If we ceased to exist, the universe would really not change. Even if our solar system ceased to exist, it would be no loss to the universe. I often feel this way when working in mathematics — the problems I work on are a tiny speck of dust in the galaxy of mathematics, and even if my subfield ceased to exist, the universe of mathematics would continue to go on existing. At the beginning of my graduate career (or as I like to call it, my apprenticeship) I had the realization that mathematics does not need Melanie Laffin to continue functioning.

Despite how demotivational the above thoughts are, I have absolutely no desire to be anything other than a mathematician. In particular, I love working on my tiny subfield of a subfield of mathematics (namely, design/graph theory in combinatorics).  This was reinforced by going to my first international conference (as in, a conference in a far away country). I had the opportunity to meet many of the superstars in design/graph theory, who fed my enthusiasm and motivated me to continue my summer research projects. It was *awesome*. Continue reading →