Tao's writing is concise enough that any further extracting, as I have done, misses the complete picture. He is careful to note down important caveats to the insights he presents. I have ignored those caveats, as worthy sacrifices to pique the interest of less technical readers. However, I hope my adaptations also serve as gateways to attract technical readers towards Tao's well-written and more comprehensive exposition. They'd probably understand more of what he writes than I did! Besides the many expository articles I didn't understand enough to confidently present, Structure and Randomness included transcripts of some of his lecture series and some of his favourite open problems in math. The target audience of the former is more technical than I am, and the latter is (by definition) at the forefront of mathematical knowledge. However, I hope that able readers check those out as well for their equally illuminating focus on the big picture without the most technical details. Tao's concise writing and excellent choice of words sometimes forces me to lift directly from him rather than cobble together my own contrived paraphrase. I hope he doesn't mind; this is testament to his writing skills. If you find my adaptations convincing and enjoyable, most of the credit goes to Tao. Why blog about research?Tao describes in the preface to Structure and Randomness the advantages of research blogging and its niche between traditional print media (journals, books) and informal communications (lectures, conferences). I will skip the benefits for the blogger himself in favor of those for the readers.
However, blog posts are not permanent enough to be cited. This pushed Tao to compile some of those posts, with corrections and further ideas from reader comments, into Structure and Randomness. The phrase "Birds' eye views" was inspired by Freeman Dyson's characterization of mathematicians as "birds" or "frogs" (Dyson, 2009). References
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