/sci/ - Science & Math

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2018/12/24/elias-stein
>I was deeply saddened to learn that Elias Stein died yesterday, aged 87.
>My weekly meetings with Eli would tend to go something like this: I would report on all the many different things I had tried over the past week, without much success, to solve my current research problem; Eli would listen patiently to everything I said, concentrate for a moment, and then go over to his filing cabinet and fish out a preprint to hand to me, saying “I think the authors in this paper encountered similar problems and resolved it using Method X”. I would then go back to my office and read the preprint, and indeed they had faced something similar and I could often adapt the techniques there to resolve my immediate obstacles (only to encounter further ones for the next week, but that’s the way research tends to go, especially as a graduate student).