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. As everyone knows, the best ideas usually arise by combining themes from seemingly diverse fields.

“ 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.

A riveting talk given by Prof. Rajesh Rao on using statistical models to decipher Indus script http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Stumbled on to this piece via 13 Writing Tips- Chuck Palahniuk : Twenty years ago, a friend and I walked around downtown Portland at Christmas. The big department stores: Meier and Frank… Fredrick and Nelson… Nordstroms… their big display windows each held a simple, pretty scene: a mannequin wearing clothes or a perfume bottle sitting in fake snow. But the windows at the J.J. Newberry’s store, damn, they were crammed with dolls and tinsel and spatulas and screwdriver sets and pillows, vacuum cleaners, plastic hangers, gerbils, silk flowers, candy - you get the point.