Gunnar Carlsson: Mindset to Move Theory into Action

You see many sharp, smart students around Stanford and other universities. But there's another aspect to things which is not only do you need to be smart, but you need to want to do something and to carry something out and to actually solve a problem, as opposed to writing a paper or finding a pretty piece of theory. And that's what I saw with Gurjeet, because I started talking about these ideas which I'm a mathematician, they're sort of only formed to a certain extent. And Gurgitt got them right away and then said, furthermore, I want to implement this. And not only that, he'd come back in two days and there'd be some kind of prototype going. And so that I found extremely impressive. And to me, it's something that I've now understood after the fact, in pure math, that stuff doesn't apply. Somehow in pure math, you're just trying to do something clever. Someone's clever, they'll do whatever they can do. But now, when I look at students, I think about a lot of different aspects of what they do. Yes, they can be smart theoretically, but also it needs to be, yes, I want to do something, I want to do it quickly, I want to prototype, maybe very rough and ready prototyping. Let's just get out and see how this theory works a little bit in some simple situations. And that's the thing that, from my point of view, is kind of often missing on the math side and other sciences too. We want to kind of build up the science in a very pretty and systematic way, but without checking at the end whether things are going to actually work and do something. So what I would say is the better idea might be, let's do a little bit of theory, just make some guesses at it, and then let's try to see does it actually work, or does it get close to working, or does it capture anything that we're trying to capture.