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Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The biggest contribution might even be "asked one question answered by a PhD student" rather than the other way around. My first original math discovery as a grad student turned out to be an idea that was published before I was born, but was just esoteric enough that I hadn't heard of it. My third was something that I got beaten to, because I didn't realize the problem was that interesting (I thought it was just another test case for my second) and I blabbed about it at a conference to someone who turned out to be 10% closer to it than I was but who just hadn't considered using his research on my question before.

I eventually learned to run more by my advisor. Having someone who's been in a field a few decades to tell you what's more or less worth working on is invaluable. Even just having someone who knows what to look for and where to look can be useful. I taught a student once who invented a numerical method I'd never seen before, one with just the right mix of "tricky enough that it might have been missed" and "valuable enough that it ought to be published", but by this point I knew which book to pull off the shelf and which chapter to hunt through to find the prior discovery without having to spend days on the literature search.