advices to a budding mathematician

Most of the following advices are derivatives of those given by my own advisor Prof. Janelidze.

- Be very careful with drawing shapes while visualising your thoughts. They can lock you into a subset of possibilities and miss some of the generalities involved.

- Work at home, wherever you are comfortable.  

- Read whatever you want. However, it is better to not read anything at all! Just keep creating and rediscovering.

- You need a good sense of aesthetics to find the right problems, good strategic skills to launch the most efficient attacks against those problems and good technical skills to flesh out the details of those attacks.

- Think while walking.

- Applied math and pure mathematics should be conducted by different people. Excelling at them require different kinds of personality traits.

- Each step in your argument should seem like the inevitable next thing to do given the previous step.