I’ve never much been one for concision. To say that the contemporary attention economy, not to mention professional communication, not to mention mainstream politics, trades on absurdly short, necessarily incomplete, if not wrong, attention-grabbing quips and barbs and slogans and pitches, effectively giving most social discourse a lobotomy, is a cliche. That doesn’t make it less true or less important. Equally, to insinuate that you have much more to say, and have such nuanced and complex ideas, that you’re above that sort of thing, that you’re so sophisticated as to be impossible to summarise or condense to that form, is not only irritating and self-important, it’s probably false most of the time too.
Anyway, as part of an upcoming workshop participants were asked to introduce themselves with a one-page slide. I took it as an extreme form of concision: summarise your maths research in one slide, Dan. In practice it turned into a word cloud with a bunch of pictures taken from my papers.
Anyway, I thought the pictures were, if not pretty to look at, a bit fun. Well, of course I would say that, I do this stuff for a living. (Or, at least, I’m supposed to. What it seems I actually do for a living is drown in email and admin and committees and so on.)
So why not post the one slide here too?
