The Networks scientist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s latest book The Formula: The Science Behind Why People Succeed or Fail is a cracker. His six laws of success summarise more than a decade of research into the science of success, in particular how the social network in which we live and operate, with its many kinds of relationships … More The Success Formula
Tom Hamer, one of the honours students I co-supervise with Kerry Taylor, has written a paper on a Private Digital Identity System on Blockchain. I don’t yet completely understand the paper, but the parts that I do understand have some pretty cool ideas. Here’s the paper: Here’s the Abstract of the paper to pique your … More Private Digital Identity on Blockchain
When proponents of index investing talk about the benefits of index investing, several things tend to come to the fore: share markets tend to rise over the long term, and dollar-cost averaging is a low-risk strategy to get the market returns; most active fund managers underperform index investing over the medium to long term, after … More Thoughts on Index Investing
Data Scientists, because of the versatility and range of their skills, can suffer from the paradox of choice when it comes to choosing a career. According to Barry Schwartz, a strategy for good decision-making when there is an abundance of choices will involve these steps, executed in a way that takes careful consideration of all … More What Kind of a Data Scientist Are You?
Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage (PPRL) is one of those problems that still doesn’t have a solid and widely accepted mathematical definition, perhaps because the problem of Record Linkage itself, especially the kind that doesn’t reduce to supervised learning through an abundance of labelled matches, still doesn’t have a solid mathematical definition despite thousands of papers published … More Linking Integer Records: The Simplest Case of PPRL
Outside Agile, Strategy is probably the most (ab)used word in the modern corporation. I used to have a very basic definition of what a strategy encapsulates, which has four components: an analysis of the current state and how we got to where we are; a statement of the end goal we want to achieve; a … More Strategy: The Art of Creating Power
I have always intuitively believe in the virtue of sleep. I have never pulled an all-nighter. I (over-)prepare for stressful events (e.g. exams, major presentations) way in advance and then ease into a more restful state as the date approaches, including doing very little and sleeping a lot the day before. I enjoy a good … More Why I am Big on Sleep
Combating terrorist financing
My Irrational Life
Updates on my research and expository papers, discussion of open problems, and other maths-related topics. By Terence Tao
