We interrupt our year-end review of Anarchy, State, and Utopia to share this story with our loyal followers: “When someone asked mathematician Richard Bellman how to tell the difference between an excercise and a research problem, he replied if you can solve it, it’s an exercise, otherwise it’s a research problem.” (Hat tip: @mathematicsprof, via Twitter.) Bonus material: Check out the TEDx video by Quique Bassat below on “Why research is cool.”
I haven’t watched the video but I can tell you that research is cool because you learn a lot more than you intended.
That’s a great way of putting it. Good research (and great scholarly papers) are in many ways about discovering something surprising or unexpected about some aspect of the world …