A week or so ago, an article appeared in Quanta Magazine that discussed disappointments / failures in the field of mathematics and of mathematicians: How Failure Has Made Mathematics Stronger | Quanta Magazine. It is an insightful interview with D. Calegari, a topologist (a mathematician who studies topology, study of “shapes” and their deformations) who talks about failures, a taboo subject in academia. I highly recommend you to read this interview even if you are not in academia because one can always “learn” better ways to deal with disappointments and failures (which are, you will agree, quite abundant in general). I feel that disappointments arising from the realization that “nobody cares about your work” transcends academia and reading about how others deal with that “successfully” can be insightful and eye-opening. It is also worth one’s time, especially when it is not in the format of a self-help book, or being preached from a high moral ground.
In addition, the introduction of the above interview contains a hyperlink for an essay Calegari had written recently about the importance of failures: Disappointment | Notices of the American Mathematical Society. In this essay, I especially liked his recollection of preparing for IMO, its qualification exam, its result and the aftermath. I feel that sort of analytical storytelling is worth everyone’s time. So have a go at that and we will continue this post shortly after that.
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Welcome back!
In the AMS essay, the author (correctly) claims that disappointment takes many forms and gives a (partial) list of how & when it can kick in. That list stuck a chord with me and in the rest of this post I will try to elaborate some of those list items from my own personal history. None of them will be as inspiring as his “IMO phase” but nonetheless, it is high time to list my failures and disappointments somewhere and what better place than my own physics blog, so here I go:
(1) being un- or under-acknowledged in a colleague’s paper or talk: This has “happened a lot” simply because of human nature I guess. As my PhD advisor used to say, “People just do their own thing and ignore what others are doing”. In general, scientists acknowledge others’ work in scientific papers via citations (that is, add a reference to the previously published papers at appropriate places in one’s own paper). But when there’s “competition”, the appropriate places tend to reduce from main text of the paper to a bunch of citations squished together in the introduction to mere footnotes. Specially, the worst culprits are those that stoop to the last method, adding a citation as if on second thought, “Oh! and here are these other authors who did a similar thing before”, when the correct way would be to cite in the main text with the phrase, “Oh! these authors pioneered this method and we have neither a way of improving it nor finding new applications for it!”. Well, I go even beyond these worst culprits by omitting to cite them altogether (& not just in future papers!), because who cares! (Well, this is a bit of an exaggeration but here’s a slightly more real recollection.)
(2) being scooped: I was scooped once within a week of starting to work on a topic. What I had done till then comprised just a couple of pages of the scooping paper and what I had planned to do was only half of it. So I was not that disappointed or disheartened, because that paper did more than what I had planned and the rest was done in the way I would have done. If that paper had appeared a month later, then that would have been quite a real disappointment. Though, it was heartening to know that I have scooped others a couple of times (with no explicit intention, obviously)!
(3) missing out on a job/prize/conference invitation: No for a prize or a conference invitation. But definitely for a job. This was the case of a postdoc job at IISc, Bangalore and the “selection committee” had deemed I was “too old” to be hired for that position even when the IISc people supporting my application told me they “had recommended me highly” to the committee. So yes, that was a great disappointment. And after that a few faculty jobs vanished in a similar fashion, though nobody cared to tell me the exact reason as people from IISc had done. Thus there was much less disappointment in these latter cases, as I started to care less & less!
(4) having a prospective student work with someone else: Well, as hinted above, I’m not a faculty member and even as a postdoc, I have only worked with a few students and never have I thought they “belong” to me. This goes back to my PhD days at the YITP, Stony Brook University (SBU). The YITP had quite an open culture regarding who worked with whom and on what! Obviously, one had an official PhD advisor but one was allowed (even encouraged) to work with other professors, postdocs, students on whatever problems / topics one fancied. No professor seemed possessive of their students. Once when I went to meet my advisor after a gap of 4 months, I remember he did not ask what have I been up to or where have I been all this time! We just talked about our “running” project (which had been on hiatus for the last 4 months). At the end of that discussion, when I told him that I have just finished a paper with others (yes, this paper was completed in such a short time and is one of the few that I am really proud of!), he simply replied, “I thought so!” and that was that. [Though, flipping this scenario around, I had taken (in my second year at SBU) an astronomy course whose professor was “impressed” with my course work and final presentation that he offered to become my advisor if my YITP oral exam didn’t go as planned. So he might have been a little bit disappointed when he lost me as a prospective student.]
(5) having a potential advisor turn me down as a student: Again a no. The first professor I approached became my advisor, both for my Masters at IITKGP and Doctorate at SBU. So nothing more to add here. Though, if my PhD advisor hadn’t agreed, I’d have been very, very disappointed!
(6) having a promising line of attack on a problem fail to pan out: Oh, this has happened countless number of times, as is common when one does research, which is the point of the above articles! Though, one that happened while I was a postdoc at NTU stands out a lot among other “failures”, because that line of attack wasted nearly 6 months of our time. Not just mine, but also my colleague’s. And on top of that I’d seen that line of attack not work in my early PhD days! So it was a double whammy of disappointment as it dawned on me that not only have I wasted others’ time but also that it was preventable because of my “prior experience”!
(7) discovering an error in an amazing proof: This hasn’t happened to me directly as such because I’m not a mathematician. But some things related to the previous point could easily be stated here in the kind of research that I have done.
(8) having a paper go unread or a book go unreviewed: No book to talk about. And no disappointment for my papers going unread because, even as Calegari agrees, nobody cares. So no point in being disappointed about that. I do my work because I like it being done, not because somebody else will notice / read it!
(9) seeing an admired senior colleague behave badly: Not really… Though I’ve seen a few “skirmishes” and I want to believe there was nothing personal about them. Taking the “couldn’t care less” attitude further, I respect their work more than them personally.
(10) realizing that I haven’t lived up to my own standards of behavior: Oh! This has happened a countless number of times. Most of my disappointments are in this category, basically. But there’s not much to elaborate…
(11) discovering that success, when it came, was not all I hoped it would be: Well, as far as academic success is concerned, I haven’t reached (and never will) the pinnacle of being a tenured professor. So I can’t say what “success” would have felt like there and if it would have been what I’d have hoped for or not. Graduating from IITKGP with an institute silver medal did feel like “success”. Getting admitted into SBU did feel like “success”. But after that, “success” has been few and far between. Graduating from SBU didn’t feel like “success” and doing three postdocs after that didn’t feel like “success” either. Many colleagues (and brilliant colleagues at that, better than me in all aspects) whom I have known for the last decade or so not “making it” in academia has not felt like “success” either. To say the least, it has instead felt like a personal failure, a crushing weight on my own self. One such disappointment was shared recently by a colleague here, here & here. You know, sometimes it feels like the world is against you but in this case, it is literally true… well, at least a country of the world!
It is also disappointing that this post will not have a hyperlink at the end.
Life in Physics... 