The Topology of Bendless Three-Dimensional Orthogonal Graph Drawing, a new paper I wrote, is now online at the arxiv. This is basically the material from a
series of blog posts I made on "xyz graphs", written up formally in more detail and formatted as a paper, although there are a few additional results not in the posts.
Together with my papers on
flip graphs and
simplicial arrangements, this marks the third time I've written a series of blog posts on a subject before realizing that my half-baked noodlings had somehow morphed into the content for a paper. Or maybe the fourth time, if you count the
triangle center paper that grew out of
some web animations I made.
Although I don't tend to get a lot of feedback on my more technical posts, something about the blogging process makes working this way feel more collaborative than when I'm working on a problem by myself without blogging about it. Just as I would when I'm discussing a problem at the whiteboard with someone in my office, I'm spending less time purely thinking about a problem and more time drawing pictures and trying to explain clearly what I'm thinking. And I think that it's helpful to interleave this sort of communication with the more traditional style of doing research while staring at walls or taking walks or taking showers or trying to fall asleep: it helps clarify the parts of the problem I'm working on that I already understand and focus my attention on the parts I don't. I know, I could just keep a notebook instead of posting things on blogs for the world to read, and sometimes I do, but that wouldn't supply the same kind of pressure to write in a way that would (I hope) be understandable to other people. And when I do eventually write a paper on something I've blogged about, the writing stage of the process is easier, because I have the posts and their illustrations to use as content.
I'm wondering that I don't see more of that sort of thing from other math or theoretical CS bloggers, actually — the category theorists have an active
collection of blogs with this sort of content, but it seems to be less common behavior among the rest of us. I suppose it's natural to worry about being scooped; I haven't yet found that to be a problem with my own blog posts, but, to be honest, I haven't been posting the ideas that I felt from the start had a strong chance of turning into papers, only the ones that started out feeling too small and then grew. And anyway, if one's blog posts succeed in getting someone else interested in the same subject, I'd think the more likely outcome would be a chance at collaboration and co-authorship.
