Design Philosophy
From Daring Fireball I got the reference to Paul Graham’s essay about his design philosophy.
I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
Okay, so let’s see. How about a
- generators-and-relations driven
- representation theory for Temperley-Lieb categories
- instead of just families of T-L algebras
- avoiding reliance on theorem/proof style
What I could do better on is
- using special conditions to get a paper out quickly and
- writing more follow-up papers to capture more generality
It’s starting to sound like my writing style…
My default Math writing strategy is similar but slightly more post-modern:
On the average of more than once per day, over the past 5 years, find:
(a) simple but nontrivial solutions;
(b) to overlooked or shallowly-probed elementary problems;
(c) regardless of whether they need to be solved;
(d) deliver them as precisely and usefully formatted as possible;
(e) in an edited legitimate online venue such as the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, Prime Curios, or MathWorld;
(f) which links to dead-tree Math and science literature and online resources;
(g) which is date-stamped and has my email address so that people may contact me if interested, because the Killer App of the World Wide Web is Collaborationware;
(h) and consider that I have been starting with a very crude version 1.0; then
(i) iterating and deepening and collaborating optimally for the golden mean of my 2,500+ cardinality portfolio of Journal articles, Books, refereed International Conference papers, arXiv reprints, letters to the editor, newspaper columns, science fiction stories with math content, poems about Math or Science, screenplays or teleplays about Math/Science, and other stuff that someone will actually pay me to do (via salary, consulting fees, or grants).
[...] and the whole thing hangs together better without it. And this brings up the design philosophy I talked about recently. In this case, writing the smaller paper first is being sort of forced on me by a short [...]