Advices to PhD students

Prof. James Kurose has a webpage which lists his talks on writing and research.

Prof. S. Keshav has a comprehensive webpage of advice to PhD students .

For Writing

If you want to find an appropriate word to modify another word, the Oxford Collocations Dictionary Online is very helpful.

If you want to find synonyms or antonyms of a word, the Thesaurus.com perhaps provides the best reference.

The Principle of Science

The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: the test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth". But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints.

But also needed is imagination to create from these hints, the great generalizations to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.

From Feynman Lectures on Physics, Richard Phillips Feynman (1918–1988), American Physicist, Nobel Laureate.

You and Your Research

At a Bell Lab seminar, Dr. Richard W. Hamming, a famous mathematical and computer scientist, gave a very interesting and stimulating talk, You and Your Research, to some 200 Bellcore staff members and visitors on March 7, 1986.