Design Sprints

Terence Tao talks about using rapid prototyping when writing math papers:

I found that the technique of rapid prototyping from software engineering is useful in ameliorating these difficulties. According to this technique, one does not write the paper in linear order, and one also refrains from the temptation of writing the easiest or most straightforward portions first.

I’m always interested in reading how prototyping can be applied in other disciplines. Also nice to see that he sometimes just goes ahead and writes the fun parts:

I must admit that sometimes (especially for shorter papers) I take a very different approach, writing the “easy” and “fun” parts of the paper first (e.g. the introduction, or some simple lemmas), and try to use the momentum generated to then write the rest of the paper quickly.

Found this after reading his profile in The Sydney Morning Herald—Terence Tao: Mozart of maths.