The book reviewed in this post. This post is a review of the book Chasing (a) Conjecture (2025) by C. B. Khare. Khare, in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Wintenberger, solved a famous outstanding problem in mathematics, known as Serre's conjecture. The book details this quest for the popular reader (largely), but also contains a literary history of the author's personal and professional development as a mathematician. I thought the book was really well written (no ghost writer

This post is about why I love writing grant proposals for getting my research funded. Not all academics do. I have come across many who consider grant writing as a chore and a necessary evil which interferes with the real business of actually doing science and publishing the work (some even hate writing papers; it's only the investigative process that really gets them excited). The facts that proposals require much work and many if not most of them get rejected also add to th

This post addresses a complaint I often hear and read about: namely that some physics professors, after a certain stage of their careers, no longer do calculations themselves (if they are theorists), or actually spend time in the laboratory tinkering with the apparatus (if they are experimentalists). Instead of performing any practical work, they become managers of students and postdocs and collaborations, overseeing the work of those who carry out the actual scientific labor