Advice for amateur mathematicians on writing and publishing papers

research.microsoft.com

2 pointshhm3 comments

This is good general advice for anyone with even a remote interest in writing academic papers (or even just good technical papers).

I just finished teaching a graduate course in computer architecture, and I was shocked at how unprepared they were in this regard. I literally had a student, after submitting a straight-up copy&paste of an ACM-published paper as his own (read: plagiarism), whine "but I've never had to write a technical paper before!". I had others, after having a week to work on an assignment, come to be the day before it's due asking "I can't find any papers.".

These are graduate students. Holy crap. I wish I'd thought to write a brief thing like this and stapled it to the back of my syllabus.

At which school? In my experience, the quality of graduate students varies even more widely than the quality of undergrads, and is more closely correlated to the quality of the school.

I'd rather not malign the school. Let's just say they're overrun by populations of students that are underqualified - a condition I think is common among schools not in the "top tier".

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