What are the defining characteristics of the greatest researchers

haile.owusu@aya.yale.edu (Haile Owusu) wrote in message news:<bdfa3be4.0302081313.595ca3cb@posting.google.com>... > What are the defining characteristics of the greatest researchers that > you know and/or have worked with? For one, they have aspirations. From my personal associations with Dr. Vishwani Agarwal, an ACM/IEEE fellow, i can tell you a few things.

1) He made his own goals and was happy with that.

2) Even though he took pleasure in research, he never overworked himself. Weekends were weekends, weekdays were weekdays.

  This is something i also found out in Micheal Haiso, who is

considered one of the best in the ATPG business. Their philosophy was was if you overstress yourself, you will only be destroying yourself. So, if you had a choice between eating and doing research, go eat first, and get your energy. Research can come later.

3) Agarwal understood his limitations. If he did not understand something, he never pretended to understand it. This is something, some great researchers have been known to do.

 Euler was never successfully able to Fermat's Last Theorem. He

understood that. Even Netwon, when he tried to solve three body dynamics, he understood the difficulties of doing things by hand and anticipated machines that do such calculations. [This little anecdote was passed onto me by someone who read principia. I havent read it and so i really do not know for sure.]

4) He was always open to ideas and was more concerned with progress, than failure.

  I think that Ed Fredkin,the guy who invented virtual memory and

cellular automato, said the same thing. If you try 100 different things, and you fail on 99 of them, you are still making progress.

This is something researcher, in my opinion, have to learn to live with.

Side note: Ed Fredkin's work was the inspiration for Wolfram's New Kind of cience.

5) He was interested in intuitive ways to understand things. In a way, he used his feelings to do math for him. A lot of people, under estimate the power of feeling. Remember that Deep Blue, tried billions of moves a second, just to tie with kasprov in 1997.

Feelings are powerful things. People always think that logic is an epitome of intelligence. And that the best way to solve problems, is to logically reason your way out of them. This is something, the most brillant researchers, i have met, do not do. They put their faith in raw emotion and believe them and follow them where ever it takes them.

Evolutionarily, instincts have been part of animals for billions of years. The human power to reason, is relativitly new thing. Peronsally, i think that the power to reason is way to delegate information processin to your subconsciousness. This sort of philosophy is something school do not teach you. And people who do not learn from school, learn to do.

Ed Fredkin was a calf tech college drop out. He became a prof of MIT, even without a college degree. Agarwal went to one of most unknown colleges in india, for his undergrad. However, today is a considered the best the world.

6) Excellent researchers, i know, also understood that, just because results are published in respected journals, it does not make them true. This is another way they use thier feelings. There are many people, whose sole intellectual survival is based on scientific publications. You see these sort of intellectuals everywhere. They will quote studies, about blah blah blah and believe almost any silly thing it says. I personally knew profs, who were like that. But they werent respected, in the scientific community.

this is just a bunch of personal observations.

So, the question, i even ask myself, if you do ,opposite of everything, that you have learn from your school teachers who get $30,000 pay, you will become a good researcher???

-suresh >