Research Philosophy

 
Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.
      Albert Einstein

I've been through a good doctoral program in computer science and was exposed the conventional approach to doing research  - hunt for a problem, research prior work on the problem, find an aspect of work on the problem that can be extended, publish in a refereed journal, repeat.  I have found that I have an aversion to this approach.  

My favorite problems - boolean satisfiability and simplification, the clique problems, graph isomorphism, and factoring - have found me, not the other way around.  They haunt me.

My greatest concern has been with having my thinking constrained or channeled by prior work.  I've done my best to avoid learning about the details of prior work in my research areas so that I have a chance of doing some fresh exploration.  This practice is against academic convention, and I run the risk of reinventing the wheel, but I have found it to be liberating and effective.

I dislike the academic emphasis on grant-funded research and frequent publication in journals or conferences as the ladder to climb for tenure and promotion.  I prefer to think for my pleasure.  I really don't need any funding for my work - most of it has been done with paper and pencil - and I resent being asked to obtain grants so that a university can skim off the cream.  I don't believe in publishing before I have something to say.  I also don't believe that communicating my research needs to wait until it is finished and polished.

Some of the results that I've obtained may have commercial value, and future work will also likely lead to some results of value.  I have been keeping this work private to allow for the possibility of future commercial development.  A friend recently persuaded me that what I truly love is the research rather than its commercial development, and that not sharing what I've been working on has been a major loss to me.  I leave open the possibility of commercial development in the future, but have decided to do my research much more in the open.

It will take me some time to find my voice - the academic style is not appropriate for the variety of people I'd like to reach.  It will take me many months to get existing material published on this site.  I plan to share the results of my research first, followed by notes on continuing research and, eventually, excerpts from my research journal.  I will attempt to be honest and let my wanderings and mistakes see the light of day - they are essential to a search.

I am addicted to what Feynman called "the pleasure of finding things out."  I have had a great time exploring things and I hope to have a great time sharing what I've found.  My work has opened some windows for me into worlds of astonishing beauty; I can only hope that some others enjoy similar encounters.

December 5, 2005

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