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Difference between mathematician and researchers in majors of applied math?

Mathematician cares about the ways to conduct a proof. Other researchers care only about the theorem itself in a practical way, not interested in the proof at all.

Mathematician cares about the directions of developing a notion. Other researchers care only about the notion itself.

How to tell a good scholar from a bad one?

1. Pick one of his work that is published single authored. You can only tell one’s research taste and writing style from the single authored work. Even a work with two authors does not distinguish his contribution, regardless of whether he is the first author or not. There are too many cases where the first author contribute little to the actual work load and it is nearly impossible to tell them apart. If you insist on investigating that, you will have to recognize his writing style and research field from the single authored work and then carefully compare them with the paper that is co-authored. This is quite amount of work and it is only possible if you are fully proficient in this area.
2. Exclude those works that are part of  work when they are PhD students. Many people can’t produce good works after their graduation. This phenomenon is particularly significant for PhDs graduated from 2nd tier US universities(ranking from 11 to 30 on university ranking list such as ARWU. No offense. Just several samples fall into this interval). Within US college, they can get ideas from seminars and academic advice from really good academic guys, yet they are nothing after leaving the atmosphere. If you see someone’s only first tier paper contains this sentence-“Part of the work was done when xx was a PhD student in the University of xxx”, then he is highly skeptical to a lack of capability to do research alone. You should not take that piece of work into consideration when assessing his academic potential. Note that I am not saying that any work within the period of PhD student are not valuable. I am saying that you should NOT take that work as the ONLY argument when assessing his academic capacity. You need more of his works to confirm. If he has other works and those works match the same research taste, research field and writing style, that’s robust conclusion. It is highly suspicious otherwise.

 

Recently, I found that building a habit of push-ups is essential for a sustainable academic career. Keep the strength in waist will help one to sit straight and minimize energy loss coming out of  a bad sitting posture. From the word of a health advisor in Harvard [1], it is impossible to maintain the subtlety of being able to maintain the body in ideal postures without a basic amount of core strength. Even for workout of push-ups, it is by no means possible to do in standard position without a certain period of training time. And it is still worthy to keep going with bad position, just to turn the basic core strength into reality.

PS: This way of workout applies in many other fields.

You will surely lose long term persistence in hardworking without a true calling, a passion or whatever it is called in this sense.

 

Benefits of latex

1. Get rid of slow response for long articles.
2. Fast input for greek symbols and math sympols.
3. Free from the pain of submitting another journal.
4. Facilitates manuscript preparation on a Mac.

Forked from page(hmm I don’t know why they deny access from mainland China). I found that MIT don’t delete pages for PhD students even a student has graduated long ago. That is a culture Chinese universities really should learn. I open up the page everyday I start working, especially in cases where latex is not applicable. To reassure, I paste the whole page here in case of a server failure in MIT.

Α	α	alpha	a	father
Β	β	beta	b
Γ	γ	gamma	g
Δ	δ	delta	d
Ε	ε	epsilon	e	end
Ζ	ζ	zêta	z
Η	η	êta	ê	hey
Θ	θ	thêta	th	thick
Ι	ι	iota	i	it
Κ	κ	kappa	k
Λ	λ	lambda	l
Μ	μ	mu	m
Ν	ν	nu	n
Ξ	ξ	xi	ks	box
Ο	ο	omikron	o	off
Π	π	pi	p
Ρ	ρ	rho	r
Σ	σ, ς	sigma	s	say
Τ	τ	tau	t
Υ	υ	upsilon	u	put
Φ	φ	phi	f
Χ	χ	chi	ch	Bach
Ψ	ψ	psi	ps
Ω	ω	omega	ô	grow

Sigma (σ, ς):There are two forms for the letter Sigma. When written at the end of a word, it is written like this: ς. If it occurs anywhere else, it is written like this: σ.

Upsilon (υ):In the above table, we suggest that you pronounce this letter like “u” in “put”. The preferred pronunciation is actually more like the German “ü” as in “Brücke”, or like the French “u” as in “tu”. If you do not speak German or French, don’t worry about it, just pronounce it the way the table suggests.

Xi (χ): This is the same sound as “ch” in “Bach”, which does not sound like “ch” in “chair”. The same sound occurs in the Scottish “Loch”, as in “Loch Lomond”, or the German “ach!”.

Footnote 1: Other pronunciation schemes
To be fair, we should mention that there are several different ways to pronounce Greek. We are teaching the Erasmian pronunciation for now. At some point in the future, we may add pages to teach some of the other pronunciations. Here are the main ways that Greek is pronounced:

Erasmian pronunciation. This is the pronunciation used here, and is probably based on the pronunciation used by a Renaissance scholar named Erasmus, who was the main force behind the first printed copies of the Greek New Testament. The Erasmian pronunciation is probably different from the way Greek was pronounced at the time of the New Testament, but it is widespread among scholars, and it has the advantage that every letter is pronounced, which makes it easy to grasp the spelling of words.
Modern Greek pronunciation. This is the way Greek is pronounced today in Greece. Some people prefer to teach this pronunciation for New Testament Greek as well. I initially learned the modern Greek pronunciation, but had difficulty learning to spell words, so I switched to the Erasmian. Modern Greek pronunciation is probably more similar to New Testament Greek pronunciation than Erasmian is, but not identical.
Reconstructed New Testament Greek pronunciation. There are some scholarly books which attempt to reconstruct the original pronunciation of New Testament Greek, and they have reached the point that there seems to be fairly widespread agreement on the original pronunciation. As far as I know, nobody ever teaches this pronunciation. Incidentally, since there was a large variety of Greek dialects, there was no single way to pronounce Greek even in the New Testament era.
Fraternity, Physics, and Calculus pronunciation. This is the way your physics teacher spoke Greek, and he learned this pronunciation in his fraternity. Next time you hear a physics teacher pronounce Greek, laugh and look superior.

Additional forms of variants from wikipedia:

epsilon \varepsilon \, Εϵε

Theta \theta \vartheta \, Θθϑ

Sigma \sigma \varsigma \, Σσς

Phi \phi \varphi \, Φϕφ

ϵ ϑ and ς appear quite often and are quite less explained by greek alphabet.

Chinese market is getting rid of pirate software. Usage with license is more prevailing nowadays. The legislation for software patent is ripe in China. Many software vendors are quietly distributing pirate software packages on the Internet that is actually released by the official themselves, increasing usage ratio and user coverage in China, leading users to accept their format of file, and suing those companies and research institutions which do not buy a(enough) legal copy(copies). That is a great strategy since 20% of the wealthy institutions will contribute to 80% of the revenue. Making the software de facto free to 80% of the individual users will help make the money from the 20% richest buyers and it can also prevent a competitor from emerging in China.

Apple computer is much more appealing for researchers in Math, Physics, CS. Once you compose your paper in English and Latex, you won’t need Word or Powerpoint or NoteExpress or Zotero. As long as your printer supports the mac OS system, it will be of no pain to switch to the Mac platform.

transform path illustrates below:

MS Word     ->Latex

Powerpoint->Latex Beamer

NoteExpress, Zotero->Bibtex

Others:

Excel->LibreOffice

Mail: Mozilla Thunderbird

Calendar: So many options out there

C compiler: Mac has its back-end clang for its use.

 

Super necessary to buy Apple care plan for production products.

China should have more innovative companies like mathematica. The company has only 1000 employees, but the revenue as of year 2022 is 120 Million dollars. That means each employee is making 120,000 dollars each year for the company. That is a great number.