Graduate Student Solves Decades-Old Conway Knot Problem

[CloudWatcher]

4. A cool interview with her ...

I like the way she thinks

https://gradschool.utexas.edu/news/studying-knots-and-four-dimensional-spaces

Research is pretty hard, and 364 days a year you won’t solve anything. I’m not actually particularly disciplined, so to make up for this I work on problems where I find the things I am thinking about on the 364 unsuccessful days inherently interesting. Then it is fun and natural to work hard every day, and if you work hard and carefully for long enough I think you will probably solve your problem.
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I worried a lot about whether I would like math research and, even more so, whether I was smart enough to do math. This undermined both my ability to really engage with the community and my work. Slowly, eventually, I learned that I love math research (at least, I love three and four-manifold topology), and there is no such thing as smart-enough-to-do-math.