Extras · 1 of 4

A typical day

Long stretches of quiet. Reading a paper someone else wrote, filling a whiteboard, getting stuck, walking away, coming back. Then writing: a proof, a report, a grant application. Then code, because most applied work ends up as a program that has to actually run. Meetings are few but intense, since explaining your argument to someone who will look for the hole in it is how the work gets checked. Progress is measured in weeks, not hours.