Zhengda's Blog

Flash cards are very useful learning tools. They can provide so-called "active recall". That means we can use them to recall our memory and understanding about the concepts, methods and subjects. Although very useful, its creation is a real challenge. How to create effective flash cards that can help us accelerate the learning procedure? I try to answer this question in this blog post. Flash cards are the most useful tools in asking questions. That means every flash card should be a question, like "Is Abraham Lincoln a good president?" or "What is 3+5?". Each question represents a certain category: definite question and open question . What is definite question? A definite question means that the answer is unique and determined. Like "What is 3+5?", the answer is 8. This kind of questions we can use flash cards to solve them quite easily. Just like an exercise. What is open question? Open question is the kind of question which you can...

Thanks to Ray Dalio, the word "principle" has become a very popular one, since he wrote a book called " Principles: Life and Work ". He also shared some  principles  which were used in Bridgewater . He once said in an interview that he wanted to know the principles behind Alexander the Great , Steve Jobs , Leonardo Da Vinci etc. If they can write down their principles and pass to others, then others can learn from these great men and improve themselves. That's a great idea! Here is another crazy thought: What would happen if 80-year old me see the principles I've laid out when I was 30-year old? Followed by this thought, here comes this article. In the article, I want to lay out the principles that I've used in the past 28 years, in studying and working, I hope this will encourage you to list your own principles and share them to the world. If you do that, please comment in below with the link to your paper, I will be thrilled to read it. ...

Taking notes is the most important skills that you can have. Notes can help you: • Remember the things you will definitely forget after some time • Organize thoughts, knowledge and ideas in your own perspective • Create artistic product • Build a legacy • Communicate with others • many other reasons ...... So it is very important to talk about how take notes. There are many useful resources about this topic, I only list two in here: • Lin Xiuhao's lecture on how to take notes (in Chinese) • Thomas Frank's Youtube Channel In next, I will talk about taking notes in general, then we will divide note-taking into three categories: study notes, research notes and life notes. At last we will talk about some techniques in note-taking and give you some examples about famous people's notes. Now let's begin: What do we need to think about note-taking? There are 3 principles in taking notes: • Admit that you will miss something (even something important...

In this article I'm going to say something about how to do research, especially how to find a good research topic. Since I'm a PhD student, I need to do some research in order to get my degree. These research topics should not only come from my supervisor, also should come from me. But it is really hard to come up with original ideas like relativity (Albert Einstein), quantum mechanics (Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Born, Bohr etc.) and chemical bonds (Linus Pauling). So the question that puzzles every researcher is: How do we tackle this major issue? I think the best way is to think of this question as a research topic. Now let's analyze it. The question that we want to answer is: How to come up with new and important ideas in research? First we need to clarify the question: What is new and important ideas in research? It is really hard to define what is "important". It is very subjective. But it is relatively easy to define what "new...