Favorite Expository Articles on Mathematics

  1. A Mathematician's Apology. G. H. Hardy, 1940.
  2. Leonhard Euler's Integral: A Historical Profile of the Gamma Function. Philip J. Davis, 1959.
  3. The Unreasonable Effectiveness Of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. Eugene Wigner, 1960.
  4. On proof and progress in mathematics. William P. Thurston, 1994.
  5. The Two Cultures of Mathematics. W. T. Gowers, 2000.
  6. A Mathematician's Lament. Paul Lockhart, 2002.
  7. What is good mathematics? Terence Tao, 2007.
  8. Does one have to be a genius to do maths? Terence Tao, 2007.

Favorite Expository Articles on Research and Academia

  1. Principles of Research. Albert Einstein, 1918.
  2. You and Your Research. Richard Hamming, 1986.
  3. The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers. Daniel F. Chambliss, 1989.
  4. So long, and thanks for the PhD! Ronald T. Azuma, 1997.
  5. The importance of stupidity in scientific research. Martin A. Schwartz, 2008.
  6. The Awesomest 7-year Postdoc. Radhika Nagpal, 2013.
  7. Applying to PhD Programs in Computer Science. Mor Harchol-Balter, 2014.
  8. How to Live in Paradise. David Evans, 2015.
  9. A Survival Guide to a PhD. Andrej Karpathy, 2016.
  10. How to Choose Your Grad School. Tim Dettmers, 2020.
There is one more article with advice for those entering PhD programs where the author has asked for the link to not be posted. Please contact me if you would like a copy.