Shishir Agrawal's Page

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Several times a year, I drive from the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, down to San Diego, where I go to school. It's a long drive, and for a lot of it, the scenery as far out as the eye can see consists of farmland. California is an agriculturally rich state. So I was surprised to learn today that, according to a recent study, over 2 million Californians, constituting nearly 35% of the population, live in food insecure… Continue

It's 2020, and I'm an itinerant mathematician. These days, I'm at a place I'd never heard of even just a year ago. It's late at night, I think the eastern horizon may start to blush soon, and I'm furiously scrawling pictures and equations in a notebook because I've finally struck inspiration, I'm on the brink of an unprecedented discovery. After too many evenings of struggling to find the elusive proof of this seemingly simple conjecture, I'm finally at the verge of… Continue

I think the key to solving big problems is to not be intimidated by their immensity. Of course this requires that we "think big," but we also have to understand that big problems, essentially by definition, cannot be solved quickly. And we have to have the motivation to keep doing every small thing we can in order to solve those big problems. The concept seems almost cliché, but it really strikes a chord of inspiration when you really begin to understand it. We can't back away from big problems… Continue