Reading list
Published:
I read the math.CO arxiv daily every morning or evening (depending on my time zone), and I very recently started keeping better track of the papers that I’d like to read in the near future.1 The Active list is roughly in order of interest and was last updated on July 29, 2025.
If you are also interested in one of these papers, feel free to email to me – we could consider reading them together.2
Active
- Godel in cryptogtaphy
- Graphical designs find combinatorial structures
- A group-theoretic approach to Shannon capacity of graphs and a limit theorem from lattice packings
- Fair distribution of bundles
- Potential theory and the boundary of combinatorial graphs
Archive
Postscript: on daily arxiv reading
One of the first tidbits of advice I received as a new PhD student was to subscribe to the arxiv daily mail. I enthusiastically did so, and proceeded to delete without reading every single daily mail for the rest of my PhD.3
In Hamburg I started reading them; I’m not sure when or why. Sometime between my first year as a PhD student and my first year as a postdoc I acquired what I needed to benefit from the daily mail: some familiarity with topics and with people, some ability to gauge, from a title, author list, and abstract, which papers I might find relevant or compelling. I assume that what I get out of the daily mail will continue to grow as I learn more. But I am already surprisingly often encountering papers I am glad to see and would not have otherwise come across.
Sometimes advice has an incubation period before it becomes useful. I’m not sure I would have thought to subscribe to the daily mail if someone hadn’t told me to, even now. Whoever told me that was four years too early, but it was valuable advice nonetheless.
I plan to keep spots for no more than 5 papers on my Active list. I’ll move papers into the Archive if they were previously on the Active list but I did not get around to reading them before other papers replaced them in the top 5. I aspire to group the Archive list by topic, but let’s get there when we get there. ↩
I should say that most of these papers are not in my area of expertise. This is partially because I am more likely to go through such a paper the same day that I see it, but mostly because I am intentionally trying to expand my breadth and read outside of my niche. ↩
Don’t ask why I did not simply unsubscribe. I cannot say. ↩