Howdy y’all,<\/p>\n
I’m Richard Wong –\u00a0 a fifth year grad student working in homotopy theory at UT Austin, and I’m a new blog writer this year.\u00a0 I’m excited to contribute to the grad blog, and share some of the tips and knowledge from my graduate career experience – hopefully they’ll be of use to new or prospective graduate students.\u00a0\u00a0One of the themes that I’d like to focus on in my series of blog posts is ways to communicate and engage with the mathematical community (and beyond!).<\/p>\n
To that end, what I’d like to share today is one quick tip to keep up to date with the endless tide of current mathematical research:<\/p>\n
Subscribe to the arXiv<\/a>!<\/strong><\/p>\n Setting up your subscription, once you decide what subject areas you’re interested in, is quick and easy! It takes maybe 30 seconds to set up, and then a minute or two a day for the rest of your life (but you can do it while eating breakfast!).\u00a0 If you want the TL;DR summary, skip ahead to the end of the post!<\/p>\n If you don’t know what the arXiv is, it’s an online and open access repository of papers in mathematics (and other sciences). What this means is that mathematicians upload preprints of their papers to the arXiv for others to freely view and access. However, though there is a moderating and endorsement system on the arXiv, the nature of such a repository is that there is no intrinsic peer review system (though most papers have been submitted to peer review journals and are awaiting publication).<\/p>\n Sounds neat, right?\u00a0 The thing is, it turns out that there is a lot of mathematics being done, and a lot of papers being published.\u00a0 In the 2018 calendar year, there were over 32,000 new submissions to the math section of the arXiv alone (arXiv stats<\/a>).<\/p>\n That’s a lot of papers to subscribe to! Luckily, you don’t have to subscribe to them all, and you can subscribe to specific areas in math, instead.\u00a0 The math section\u00a0is sorted into 32 subject classes<\/a> including algebraic geometry, analysis of PDEs, history of mathematics, mathematical physics, etc.<\/p>\n This means that you can pick and choose the categories you restrict your attention to, which drastically reduces the number of papers that you might want to read.\u00a0 For example, I am currently subscribed to math.AT (algebraic topology) and math.CT (category theory).\u00a0 On a typical day, there are maybe about 3-10 new submissions in these two categories combined.<\/p>\n Once you’ve chosen the categories you might be interested in, you can now subscribe to them!\u00a0 Subscription means that you will receive a daily email of a list of titles, authors, and abstracts of the papers that were submitted (or updated) in the past 24 hours with the subject tags that you selected.\u00a0 Also, it is extremely easy to subscribe to additional categories, as well as cancel your subscription, so don’t feel the need to agonize over your initial selections.<\/p>\n To subscribe to the arXiv<\/a>, you simply need to send an email to math@arxiv.org, with the subject “subscribe”, and in the message body, add the subject tags that you’d like to subscribe to.\u00a0 (You can also subscribe to other fields by separately emailing the appropriate email address)<\/p>\n Here’s an example of the email I would send if I wanted to subscribe to math.AG (algebraic geometry):<\/p>\n To: math@arxiv.org<\/p>\n Subject: subscribe Richard Wong<\/p>\n <\/p>\n add AG<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If, after a week or two, I decide that I’m not interested in being subscribed to algebraic geometry after all, I can also cancel my subscription as follows:<\/p>\n To: math@arxiv.org<\/p>\n Subject: subscribe Richard Wong<\/p>\n <\/p>\n del AG<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s that easy!\u00a0\u00a0So now, as part of my daily routine, I take (literally) a minute or two to look at the new arXiv postings, and read the titles. If the title sounds interesting, I’ll skim the abstract. And if the abstract sounds interesting, I’ll do two things – first, I’ll pin the email to make sure I don’t forget to look at the paper. Secondly, when I have time, I’ll take a look at the paper.<\/p>\n If you’re a new grad student, I would actually recommend reading both the titles and the abstracts of new submissions to get a feel for the keywords and ideas that seem to pop up a lot – this is a sign that these ideas are useful and\/or interesting! But as you get a handle on what’s going on in the subject, feel free to scale back and be more discerning with the abstracts and papers that you read.\u00a0 Now go ahead and subscribe!<\/p>\n TL;DR:<\/p>\n Step 1. Pick your subject classifications<\/a>. <\/p>\n Disclaimer<\/em>: The opinions expressed on this blog are the views of the writer(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the American Mathematical Society.<\/p>\n Comments Guidelines<\/em>: The AMS encourages your comments, and hopes you will join the discussions. We review comments before they are posted, and those that are offensive, abusive, off-topic or promoting a commercial product, person or website will not be posted. Expressing disagreement is fine, but mutual respect is required.<\/p>\n
\nStep 2. Subscribe to them by sending an email<\/a>.
\nStep 3. Keep up to date by reading the titles (and maybe abstracts) every day!<\/p>\n