I (mostly) finished my year of grad school a few weeks ago. So here’s a year in review for a future me (hello Future Sina! greetings from the past!).
 

· I did not learn that much economics.

· and most of what I did learn isn’t useful

· to take the math courses I wanted to take, I ended up having to carry quite a heavy workload: 10 courses instead of 8 (4 of which were math and very hard!). Future Sina, be proud of this.

· I actually learned more math this past year than economics. Looking back on it, I sorta like to think that my graduate program was in both economics and math (just like undergrad).

· and anyway, I’ve always considered myself to be a mathematician in my heart of hearts.

· I learned a lot of financial math. The same kind of math that the news media blames for bringing the world to its knees in 2008 (I’m not sure that’s exactly true, but nevermind that).

· I mostly felt like a visitor at McMaster — it never felt like my school

· it felt a little strange to pay off my tuition in cash — just not used to the idea.

· I rather enjoy teaching and I think the students enjoy me too

· McMaster could really be a great school, and Hamilton could be a great city. Just one or two crucial things — but soon, you’ll see.

· one of my favourite things was having a real legitimate art gallery right on campus — a great study break

· in the fall and spring, walking home from my office, I’d see many deer roaming around the neighbourhood, eating grass — just there, casually, for no good reason!

· but the rumours are true: Hamilton is sorta shady. Luckily the campus is far away from this.

· And the water tastes like chlorine — no exaggeration

There’s a project/website out there that traces mathematicians’s “genealogy” through their PhD advisors, their advisor’s advisor, and so on. Now obviously I don’t have a PhD advisor, but if you look at professors I’ve simply taken courses with, I’m a direct mathematical descendent of:

Isaac Newton
Galileo
Euler (my email’s namesake)
Gauss
Leibniz
all the Bernoulli’s
Fourier
Poisson
Lagrange
Laplace
Hilbert
Felix Klein
Lipschitz
Dirichlet
Weierstrass
Bessel
Mersenne
Jacobi
Borel
Laurent Schwartz

Basically everyone. Which is not at all a sign of my mathematical brilliance, but of how explosive genealogy trees are. It’s also a nice example of why it’s so foolish to care about things like pedigree and lineage and race and family name.

This one is such a fundamental part of my soul that I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to add it to my list.

Rule 17: Be uncertain.

 
Some variants:

· Everything you know can possibly be wrong.
· Doubt and question.
· Recognize your ignorance and leave room for doubt.
· Live with a healthy skepticism for everything.
· Recognize the ignorance of experts.
· Have no respect whatsoever for the authority of experts.
· Forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself: “Does it make sense?”

One of the great things about Wikipedia is that it teaches you to do this automatically.

 
HT: Dick Feynman