View source for What are the defining characteristics of the greatest researchers that you know and/or have worked w

<pre>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?</pre>

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
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