New Talk About Research Motivations Available

April 19, 2021

A new talk is available for viewing. I gave a version of this talk today at UIC, and this recording was the practice. The content is motivated by growing pains I was having while writing my thesis, which I will elaborate a bit below.

In this talk, I’ve focused on explaining the research problem I’ve been trying to tackle in my PhD at the best of my abilities.

Oftentimes when I go to seminars or read papers, I feel like I don’t really understand the problem the math is trying to tackle in the first place because I am distracted by the opacity of the math. I’ve been guilty obscuring the broader point of my research myself, partly perhaps to hide that I don’t really have a good sense of the research questions I am pursuing.

I’ve tried to do better here, and spent some time thinking more deeply about the motivations of my research, having important conversations with my supervisor, and doing some readings perhaps I should’ve done a long time ago. In the talk itself, I tried to elaborate on my new understanding of the problem enough to leave the direction of the research itself wide open to criticism, which I am now able to accept as a good thing.For example, in the actual live talk, someone pointed out that I did not formalise the fact that we implicitly want our normal forms to evaluate with low complexity to positive group elements. We have only formalised that we want the normal forms to be recognisable with low complexity. I think that is an excellent point that I have overlooked.

If you are interested in my line of research and would like a gentle starting point, I would recommend this talk to you.

PS: I think the audio should be better in this recording than in the previous ones also.