Everything Else

Quotes

“Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Simplicity is a great virtue, but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse, complexity sells better.”
— Edsger W. Dijkstra

“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and others geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.”
— Galileo Galilei

“Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with “bits” in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.”
— Italo Calvino

“To infinity and beyond!”
— Buzz Lightyear

My Erdős Number (and Paths)

My Erdős Number is 4 (as far as I know). I am aware of the following paths:

• Mirco -> Massimiliano Pontil -> Charles A. Micchelli -> Allan Pinkus -> Paul Erdős
• Mirco -> Reza Olfati-Saber -> Richard Murray -> Leonard J. Schulman -> Paul Erdős
• Mirco -> Ronald A. Peterson -> Daniela Rus -> Noga Alon -> Paul Erdős
• Mirco -> Vito Latora -> Norio Konno -> Tomasz Łuczak -> Paul Erdős
• Mirco -> Giovanni Russo -> Peter L. Polyakov -> Steven George Krantz -> Paul Erdős

Useful Resources for Research and Academic Advice

Writing, Presenting and General Research Advice

• How to Write a Good Paper and Give a Good Research Talk by Simon Peyton-Jones

• Tips on How to Write a Great Science Paper by Cormac McCarthy

• Nature article about preparing a good paper submission

• In Defence of the Scientific Paper by Matt Welsh

• The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research by Martin A. Schwartz

Ph.D. Students

• How not to Get a Ph.D. by Estelle M. Phillips and Derek S. Pugh

• The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. by Matt Might

• So you Want to Go to Grad School? by Matt Welsh

Postdocs

• Computer Science Postdocs Best Practices by CRA

Faculty

• How to Be a Bad Professor by David Patterson

Some Interesting Randomly Chosen Pointers

Computer Science

• Christos Papadimitriou’s Reading the (CS) Classics course (see also this list)

Programming

• Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig

• Joel on Software

• The Zen of Python

Maths

• The Importance of Mathematics by Timothy Gowers

• Steven Strogatz’s posts in the NYT’s Opinionator

• The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive at St. Andrews

• Wolfram Mathworld

• Erdős Number Calculator by the American Mathematical Society

xkcd

• xkcd

• Create xkcd Style Diagrams in TeX

Some Randomly Chosen Videos

• Running in St Andrews [from “Chariots of Fire” - opening scene]

• Finite Simple Group (of Order Two) [yes, it is a love song]

• Bach’s Crab Canon on a Mobius Strip

• Pendulum Waves

• AI Risks, Superintelligence, Dogs, Loaves of Bread and Potential Countermeasures

• Mahler’s first symphony, as played by 12 networked Sinclair ZX Spectrums

An Intellectual Battle: Proving the Non-existence of Spaghetti Bolognese

• One of my long-standing intellectual battles has been to prove the non-existence of Spaghetti Bolognese: you might be interested in watching this BBC video or read this comprehensive Wikipedia entry in order to get an in-depth introduction to this fundamental ontological problem. And be careful, there are people that are trying to convince us that Spaghetti Bolognese exist starting from a very early age.

• You should try Tagliatelle alla Bolognese instead, i.e., the real thing. This survey about Italian food recipes that are not from Italy at all might also be helpful. Even Michael Portillo recently investigated this very important issue in a BBC documentary - watch this video. And this is an article from the Guardian about some Spaghetti Bolognese heretics.

• For more about what Bologna can offer in terms of food (real food, not fantasy one) and culture, you might want to take a look at this New York Times article (and also this) and this Guardian article.

Last updated: 27 February 2026.