amathres_info

Academia is nice because I get paid decent money to work about 30 hours a week, and what little work I do is mostly fun.

On sabbatical, I can work even less (and don't have to deal with students), and I get to live in an interesting place I haven't been before. Why wouldn't I want to do that? Ditto conferences.

I don't really understand the question. Academia can be great if you have tenure, but sabbatical is even better, so why not do it.

Most professors do not have >>1 postdoc in their careers, because most of us teach at less research-intensive (or entirely teaching-focused) schools that have no postdocs at all. The way things work now, even to get a liberal arts school job requires you to do a postdoc first (at least in my corner of STEM). Anyway, professors at research-heavy postdoc-having schools could get away with more than one. But certainly the status quo is insane, you will hear no argument from me.

Another tip: the vast majority of ArXiv papers have the LaTeX source available under "other formats". I used to download those instead of the pdfs for better searching. Now I don't really bother keeping a personal collection of papers, however.

Downloading the LaTeX source also has the advantage that you can see the comments the authors made that don't show in the pdf version. Sometimes appalling: "% Author 1: Is this lemma even true? This proof seems like bs to me % Author 2: Eh screw it who knows, it's probably true."

I'm another academic mathematician. I'm not really convinced that all this would be a time-saver for me as far as research productivity; maybe I'm just old-fashioned but I just have a few folders for paper notes and that's it. But certainly this could vary from person to person.

To me, the place for the real time savings is organizing your teaching workflow. If you're a grad student, make sure to get on top of that ASAP. A lot of it is very repetitive both within a given semester and also from year to year. I have a ton of scripts built up over the years for things like organizing lecture notes (especially if you are teaching a class you have taught before, you don't want to have to rewrite all your lectures), creating problem sets / solutions, inputting grades into the LMS,... I even have automatic solution generators for a few rote calculations that I assign many problems about (Gaussian elimination, for example).

The UIC grad student union is pretty effective at keeping their teaching hours to under 20 hours per week (so, you complain to them when there's too much grading). But the stipends there are among the lowest of good math departments, certainly lower than many non-unionized places. How much of this is due to the union being ineffective vs UIC being broke and poorly run I don't know. [Source: I used to teach math at UIC]

Overall I am not really convinced grad student unions really make much of a difference in practice, at least as far as everyday stipends and working conditions. I am at a non-unionized place now and we don't work the students any harder. But in principle it's certainly a good idea, and I have indeed seen the union be a useful advocate in certain special situations.

I vouch for the Sunbeam F1. It reminds me of the dumbphones of yore and is totally functional. Also check out r/dumbphones, lots of reviews there.

This was a problem, but in the last year or two there are some good ones again. Check out the Sunbeam F1, which is actually reasonably snappy.

I have used a dumbphone all along and agree that they were really bad for awhile. The Alcatel Go Flip 2 was a Kai OS device that was one of the worst pieces of a electronics I ever used, and I was stuck on it for 4 years because there were no alternatives on 4G. But now the phones are alright again.

The article highlights the Light Phone, but my impression is its battery life is so bad I wouldn't want it. But it's also custom software on a custom device and has some potential.

I have never seen the appeal of this "smartphone" fad and have had a dumbphone all along. I think the article misses another reason for recent resurgence, which is that the most recent generation of dumbphones are actually usable. There was a dark period from about 2012-2020 where the phones were simply terrible: bad hardware, bad software etc. My phone from 2005 was better than anything available during that period. (The problem was that the old great models couldn't be adapted to 4G networks, and nobody wanted to write new software for dumbphones.)

Now there are some nice ones available again. I like the Sunbeam F1.

I think you are all missing the context here. The "Association for Mathematical Research" is a new organization created by various people who got in trouble on woke math twitter. Nobody had heard of it until yesterday. (Their crimes are mostly opposing diversity statements in job applications, or favoring gifted programs.) It looks like a schism with the AMS (which more-or-less publicly takes the opposite view on these things), though they deny it. The impetus for the new group is clearly political. They got a few big names on there, but everybody on the board is already known for holding retrograde political views and I think they all signed one of the dueling petitions about this in the AMS Notices a year or two ago.

This is just a filler page to make it look like they have some content. It's not a serious list of mathematical software. There are good ones of those done elsewhere.