Formal writing of thesis 1. When writing a paper, you should be able to take advantage of your ability, because there are too many books to read in the information explosion, so you must build your own knowledge tree. First, you should have your own knowledge tree, and hang relevant things on that tree, but don't hang irrelevant things all the time, and slowly give up some things that can't be hung up, and then. However, how to form this knowledge tree? As a first step, you must be very familiar with useful books or data in your field of concern.

2. Form your knowledge tree

Yesterday, I asked Academician Yu-sheng Lin, who is over 70 years old this year. I told him that I was going to give a speech today, so I asked him, "What would you say if you talked about this topic? He said: "There is only one thing, that is, all five or six important books should be read several times. "Because Mr. Yu-sheng Lin is a Heyeke, and there are several students of modern thinkers at the University of Chicago, an important part of their training is intensive reading of the original classics. This sentence is very reasonable. Although you can't just read those important books, those five or six books will gradually form the backbone of your knowledge tree. If you want to hang on it later, you can refer to this framework and then temporarily put aside irrelevant things. Life is short, and knowledge is short. You can't read all the good books in the world, so you should learn to choose between them. You should know that you can't read all the books you are interested in, and once you have read all the books you are interested in, you are likely to end up like the owner of the old bookstore in Princeton Street, because reading too much is not the knowledge in your field of concern, but just a dollar for you.

Master tools

At this stage, we must master the language and appropriate tools. If you want to have a foreign language that you can read fluently, if you want to have another language that you can at least understand the title of the article, it is better to learn more, but at least one language, whether it is English, Japanese or French. You must be able to read relevant books fluently, which is the minimum prerequisite. Once this tool is gone, your vision will be greatly limited, because Chinese is like a skylight, without which your room will be closed. Why do you want to understand the topic? Because then there won't be an important article and you don't know it. If you can't even read the title, you don't know how to ask for help or check the relevant data yourself. You must master other tools, whether statistics or any other tools, because you have no time to learn such tools in the future.

4. Break through the boundaries between disciplines

Interdisciplinary learning should be regarded as a very important thing, but what is involved in interdisciplinary must be helpful to your knowledge tree. You should learn to steal a few shots from other fields, absorb some concepts from other fields, and have a different kind of inspiration for the problems you care about, but don't overflow and never return. Why did you steal those shots? In recent decades, it has been found that the most innovative parts of both science and humanities occur at the intersection of disciplines. Why is this happening? Because most of our current disciplines were formed in the West19th century, and China lent them to us. When the division of these knowledge disciplines was formed in the19th century, many of them had the ideological and academic background of that era. For example, Dean Li of Academia Sinica majored in physical chemistry, and he won the Nobel Prize for working at the junction of physics and chemistry. Just like the Nobel Prize in Economics, if the prize awarded in the past 20 years is just a sideline in the traditional economics prize, how can there be such a thing in classical economics? Even psychologists have won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and even mathematician john nash has won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Why? Because they are all at the boundary of disciplines, the boundary between disciplines and platforms has made a breakthrough. In the platform itself, in the original subject core, it has been searched too many times, and there may not be much innovation, so why interdisciplinary learning is a very important thing.

Often the master's thesis or doctoral thesis is the most important and key concept, but usually you can't catch it in this subject because you have been immersed in this subject for too long, and you have taken photos in this small warehouse with a flashlight for too long, forgetting that there are other things that can better explain the phenomenon of your materials, but these things are hard to find. Why did mathematician john nash win the Nobel Prize in Mathematics? Why did his doctoral thesis on game theory win the Nobel Prize in Economics several decades later? Because he had an introductory course in economics in college, he thought that mathematics could be used to think about economics, but at the beginning, he didn't think it would be so useful. He made a breakthrough in the combination of mathematics and economics. Sometimes it doesn't matter much in this part of economics, and it doesn't matter much in this part of mathematics, but when they are added together, there will be sparks.