Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. (Samuel Johnson, “Rasselas”)
Take your duties and responsibilities seriously; being frivolous is fine with friends, but can be annoying for your colleagues, especially those who are busy with similar responsibilities.
Exercise professional courtesy and respect for the time and efforts of your colleagues. Unless you are already on good casual terms with the person you are interacting with, send them an email (or text, if you are close enough to share phone numbers) to schedule a call or meeting rather than just showing up or calling unannounced. If you have an appointment, be on time; being too late or too early can disrupt your colleague’s other plans for the day and can also be viewed as a sign of disrespect. Be presentable in appearance; there is usually no need to adhere to formal business attire, but one should not be excessively unkempt or ungroomed either.
One’s writing should also be taken seriously; your work is going to appear in permanently available journals, and what may seem witty or clever today may be incredibly embarrassing for you a decade from now.
Being assertive is fine, but being overly self-promoting or competitive is generally counterproductive; if your work is good, it should speak for itself, and it is better to spend your energies on creating new mathematics than trying to fight over your old mathematics.
Try not to take any research setbacks (such as a rejection of a paper, or discovery of an error) personally; there are usually constructive resolutions to these issues that will ensure that you become a better mathematician and avoid these problems in the future.
Be generous with assigning credit, acknowledgements and precedence in your own writing (but make sure it is assigned correctly!). The tone of the writing should be neutral and professional; personal opinions (e.g. as to the importance of a subject, a paper, or an author) should be rarely voiced, and clearly marked as opinion when they are. In short, you should write professionally. (See also my advice on writing papers.)
On your web page, keep the personal separated from the professional; your colleagues are visiting your web page to get your papers, preprints, contact info, and curriculum vitae, and are probably not interested in your hobbies or opinions. (Conversely, your friends are probably not interested in your research papers.)
13 comments
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20 March, 2009 at 8:44 am
Zach Harris
> On your web page, keep the personal separated from the professional
> …
> your colleagues … are probably not interested in your hobbies or
> opinions.
With all due respect, I beg to differ. Or perhaps I should say, I plea for the right to be an exception to your claims, as comes through quite clearly on my own sites. And I also quite enjoy to go looking for someone else’s research paper and get a bit of a personal feel for what kinds of things are important to them. I care about the person, not just the proofs.
5 June, 2009 at 4:54 am
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5 July, 2010 at 10:20 pm
gokul
people like Feynman probably wouldn’t have agreed with being too ‘professional’
5 July, 2010 at 10:21 pm
gokul
I guess it boils down to personal taste with some restraint.
7 July, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Jonathan Vos Post
As to gokul’s unsubstantiated claim that “people like Feynman probably wouldn’t have agreed with being too ‘professional’”:
(1) there are no living people like my mentor Richard P. Feynman;
(2) he was utterly professional in his Physics;
(3) Feynman published several notable books and about 150 papers according to
http://ysfine.com/feynman/feykant.htm
(4) his work was worthy of a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics 1965;
(5) the fact that he knew how to have fun, and why not to waste time serving on committees, hardly marks him as ‘unprofessional.’
Q.E.D.
7 July, 2010 at 10:21 pm
gokul
I loved Feynman too. I mean it in a positive sense : that one _could_ have fun writing and need not be too professional in a boring sort of way …
no offense intended to anybody.
7 July, 2010 at 10:26 pm
gokul
I meant it in a sense similar to Zach Harris comment.
Again, I mean, that Feynman’s fun style is good and I like it. Hope there aren’t anymore misunderstandings.
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