Some Quotes on Research"Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they're momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of - and couldn't exist without - the many months of stumbling around in the dark that precede them." Andrew Wiles "The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics." G. H. Hardy "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny...'" Isaac Asimov "Contrary to what Asimov says, the most exciting phrase in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' or 'That's funny...,' it's 'Your research grant has been approved.'" John Alejandro King "A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it."" Albert Einstein "Nothing is more practical than a good theory." Kurt Lewin "An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." Niels Bohr "An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing." Nicholas Butler "Pavel Vasil'evich liked only his own articles, while articles written by others, which he was supposed to read or listen to, always felt to him like a cannon muzzle directed straight at his face." Anton P. Chekhov "Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target." Homer Adkins "The use of deep techniques flourishes best when it stays in touch with applications." Martin Shubik "The prevailing perspective in academia is often caricatured by the metaphor that "basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target."... Industry, on the other hand, is replete with preexisting targets: a company's business plan, product performance specifications, project cost and timing goals, and so on. Few companies today can afford to invest in significant amounts of high-risk, unfocused, exploratory research with the goal of capitalizing on any breakthrough wherever and whenever one occurs." Kenneth C. Hass "Luxury and learning are ill bed-fellows." Charles W. Eliot "An author who is willing to take credit for a paper must also bear responsibility for its contents." On Being a Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Research (2nd edition, 1995) Some Quotes on Teaching"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men." Bill Beattie "Think what the teacher's job entails. First, a textbook must be chosen, a syllabus prepared, and the material being taught (which your teacher may or may not have worked with in some time) completely mastered. This is before you ever step into class on that first day. Second, for every lecture the teacher gives, there is at least an hour's preparation, writing down lecture notes, thinking about how best to present the material, and so on. This is on top of the time spent grading student work - which itself can be done only after the instructor works the exercises for him or herself. Finally, think about the anxiety you feel about speaking to an audience, and about your own math anxiety, and then imagine what a math teacher must do: manage both kinds of anxiety simultaneously. It would be wonderful if every instructor were a brilliant lecturer. But even the least brilliant deserves consideration for the difficulty of the job." Source: www.mathacademy.com "Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre." Gail Godwin "In what may as well be starkly labelled smug satisfaction, an amazing 94% [of college instructors] rate themselves as above average teachers, and 68% rank themselves in the top quarter of teaching performances." K. Patricia Cross "Students ratings collected a year apart from the same students correlated significantly, though the later ratings tended to rate the teacher as less effective than those collected at the end of the course." John Centra "A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students." John Ciardi "The best learners... often make the worst teachers. They are, in a very real sense, perceptually challenged. They cannot imagine what it must be like to struggle to learn something that comes so naturally to them." Stephen Brookfield "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein "If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize." Richard Feynman How Much Do Professors Work?Outside academia, it is commonly underestimated how demanding a university professor's job is. People often just think of the number of teaching hours per week - which is like estimating the workload of a musician or an actor only by the time spent on stage - and are not aware of how many other tasks professors must handle at the same time. An incomplete list of these tasks is given below. The amount of time spent on each one varies widely across different institutions and disciplines and is very hard to estimate, so this is not attempted here. TeachingFor each course:
ResearchFor each research project:
Fundraising and student supervisionFor each research project:
Service
Miscellaneous
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