“The plural of anecdote is not data.” - Roger Brinner

To visualize data efficiently, one must make a transition from a state where you use point and click interfaces (a user’s view) to a state where you can code your own graphic( a developer’s view). At the outset, “User’s view” is very appealing as you can use a cutesy GUI to draw some graphs etc. However if you have discover something in the data, this “User’s view” is of no use and one needs to acquire developer skills to visualize graphics.

One of my favorite quotes about writing/composition is, “We write to know about that which we know” - Grace Paley By writing down the stuff that you have in your mind, you bring some structure in to your thought process and this structure in turn helps you think better. Most of the times there is an internal editor in our mind which kind of censors our thoughts in forming connections.

“ We do no market research . . . We figure out what we want.” _ - Steve Jobs_

I was introduced to writing math at a very late stage of my education. Somehow math meant solving bunch of problems, understanding theorems / proving theorems or translating math problems in to an algorithm that could be solved numerically on a computer. What has “Writing”, as in writing in plain English got to do with learning mathematics ? My first brush towards this activity happened accidentally while I was teaching as an adjunct.