Zhengda's Blog

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...