text:
Etiquette: senior and junior professors co-advising
I'd like to ask two professors who work at my university to be the co-advisors of my Masters thesis (mathematics).
They work in the same research group on (almost) the same topic (which is well-aligned to my interests), although they actually never published together, and get along well.
The first one (A) is an Emeritus professor who has been for over 40 years one of the world leaders in my research area and is still very active; the second one (B) is younger (mid-forties) tenured professor  but has already established a very good research reputation; also, he is A's former student.
In my opinion they complement each other very well and working with the two of them will be an extremely instructive experience.

Who should I contact first to talk about my research proposal to avoid being disrespectful to either of them?

Unrelated, but one is the former student and they never published together? Surprising, but I guess this is normal in mathematics...?

@Emilie Yes, this happens quite often (because of many diverse reasons or circumstances) and appears to be perfectly normal.

The emeritus professor might not be allowed to advise any students officially because of his retired or semi-retired status, so talk to the Prof B first and discuss with him that you'd like Prof A to be involved. You can work with him to figure out how to approach A and in what role he can "legally" act under your university's regulations.

You've made a very good point; thank you. I'm just a bit concerned that this approach might be construed as a little rude (or disrespectful) towards Prof. B.

@Riku, how would B be offended by this approach? Having co-advisors almost always requires consent from both, so it seems to me best to start with one of them and work together to build the team. If there are questions about the legal capacity of one of them to advise, then it might be best to start with the one who can best navigate the system to find out about the other's status before approaching the other one. It's as simple as saying "I'd like to work with both you and Prof A on my thesis." That shouldn't be offensive to anyone.

You're right; I'm probably overthinking this. Thanks again; I'll let you know how it turns out.


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Why do most talented children still enter college after the age of 18?
Considering how the complexity of science is growing with each passing year, it would make sense for people to start working on their degree as soon as possible. However the academic system in place in most countries doesn't seem to accommodate for that, as even the talented children still graduate after the age of 18.
Why isn't there a push to lower the age of people entering college and is it a rational decision on behalf of the government?

In most countries I am aware of there is no hard requirement on age to enter university, and they do take people that graduate from high school earlier.

@Davidmh yes, but not aware of a push to (say) take the top-5% of all 6-grade graduates and have them enter college by the age of 15.

I agree with your concern but I don't agree with your solution - at least in the US, university is more than just being a stellar academic; it's the first time a lot of kids are without their parents for an extended period of time, the first time since youth that people have to make new friends, the first time people have legitimate responsibilities, et cetera. I don't think a 15-year-old has the maturity to deal with that; instead, a better solution is start teaching more science and math at an earlier age so less time is spent in college taking classes and more time researching.

WIthout knowing the data, I think with your 5% number you are vastly overestimating the number of children for which it would make sense to enter college at 15. I think you are either overestimating how many "child prodigy" level geniuses there are, or underestimating the value of school for regularly smart children.

The other point I want to make is that there are various "magnet" schools scattered throughout the US, oftentimes providing a pre-degree curriculum (more bio classes for pre-med students, more math classes for pre-engineering students!), and some of them have small research labs that operate in conjunction with a nearby university (Princeton, for example). These aren't horribly common but they exist, and I think it's the best of both worlds: a pre-university structured curriculum, and all the social growth and development of high school.

Improving science education in high school seems like a more reasonable way to adapt to increasing scientific complexity.

In Sweden, people usually start university at 19. And furthermore, many take some years to work or learn a profession before starting their degree.

I would argue that given the increasing complexity, students should be delaying starting college to give them more time to understand the "basics".

This kind of elitism doesn't go down well with my Central European heart.

Side note: My local community college allows eligible high-school students to take classes at the college while taking regular high-school coursework. In fact, someone from my old high school worked on his associates degree.

As @moonman239 alludes too, in the US (more so in some parts than others), I know there are "AP" courses available. High school classes that count towards College Credits. Do you factor this into your question? Just because someone "graduates" high school at 18 doesn't mean they haven't started college already... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement

I know some people who started university with 16. Is this enogh evidence to prove you wrong?

@JonasDralle There are even people who have had their PhD by the age of 20, but there's not a general trend to push gifted children to graduate high school as soon as possible.

I would challenge the idea that it's always, or even usually, a good idea to push talented young people into college, especially these days, when practically-unlimited enrichment is available to anyone with an internet connection.  Academia isn't everything in life, and IMHO too many people already are locked in to a high school/college/graduate path that gives them little experience of the rest of the world.

it would make sense for people to start working on their degree as soon as possible — [citation needed]

Even ignoring those who start uni early, this question completely misses all the places where the normal age to finish high school is 17, like where I live in Queensland. And I wouldn't be surprised if there are some places where the typical high school graduate is only 16.

I find it hilarious that in this entire debate, no one is asking if talented children wish to enter college earlier for a science degree!

@JeffE isn't it scientifically proven that learning capabilities peak by the early 20's and then slowly wear off?

@JonathanReez  scientifically proven that learning capabilities peak by the early 20's and then slowly wear off  — [citation needed]

@JonathanReez No it hasn't, and so what if they did?

I don't think there is a need for this. Realistically, you can perhaps push the entrance age by one to three years: that compared with the expected working life of 44 years (from ages 23 to 67) is tiny. So, in the large scheme of things, having a small fraction of people (you suggest around 5%) increasing their work life in a 4% has a negligible impact.
What are the risks? You will be putting a lot of pressure on immature kids. Some can take it well and become successful; others will drop out soon enough; and others will end up burnt and fail catastrophically. Accelerated programs require a careful assessment of the participants, and following up to make sure they are keeping up (NOTE: no idea if they actually do it). Scaling this to a 5% of the population is a difficult undertaking, and you are up for a massive increase in drop outs, among the best students, no less.
And lastly, part of the whole educational experience is growing in both knowledge and maturity. Short cutting courses can speed up the first, but not the second.
There is a much more gentler road, and it is exposing the good students to advanced materials, done through advanced classes in high school, or taking a few university level courses, as Bill Barth mentions. This allows them to learn more, but also keeps the risks low. It also helps keeping them engaged, as they can choose to take early the subjects that they like, and later in life will take the ones that also need.

From my experience, they did not do enough, and many students returned to their original high schools due to inability to keep up with coursework independently or stay within the bounds of the rules of a boarding school for minors (with drugs, alcohol, and sex being the frequent kick-out offenses).

I'm speaking from FL, USA. I can echo some sentiments here: The dual-enrollment/early college plan can work very nicely if it's done right. A big problem back when I went to HS is that I didn't even know such a program existed. The big focus was standardized test scores such as FCAT, and no one at the HS was going to waste their time letting either the student or their parents know what the options were.

"I don't think there is a need for this."  There is a need.  For some people, high school is harmful.  For example, they might be harassed because they are a minority.  In addition to the personal benefits of starting college two years early, I will benefit financially by about USD300,000 (in 2016 dollars) over the course of my career.

"And lastly, part of the whole educational experience is growing in both knowledge and maturity. Short cutting courses can speed up the first, but not the second."  Actually, Simon's Rock College did some psychological testing on their students and found that 16 year old college freshmen were like 16 year old high school students, but 17 year old college sophomores were like 19 year old college sophomores.

Would you like your extraordinary talented kid to go to college that early? I wouldn't.
Don't rob children of their childhood. Being educated and being a brilliant scientist is valuable, but is hardly most valuable.
I feel that you can hardly skip any part of human development without consequences. A 16-years-old needs to gain experiences they can only gain if they live their life as a normal teenager. Investing only in intellectual development is a mistake; a fully competent person should have other competences as well. IQ is not everything, we also have emotional intelligence and other types of intelligence that must not be overlooked. This is especially important in case of brilliant scientists, who must be aware of societal and moral implications of their research. A person who has no broader horizons than just science is a pitiful view indeed.
Even more: allowing a young person to earn all sorts of experiences may help in the development of their overall intellectual capabilities, helping them to achieve even better results also in that particular field that is science.
Also, I can't shake off the feeling that however brilliant they might be, a kid will be much more happy if they live their life as a kid.
Last but not least, what the kid will do in their life is THEIR decision, not their parents or headhunters or whoever. Pushing their to college that early robs them of this right. The decision is made for them. Wait till their adults, and let them decide themselves if they want to go to college.
Bottom line: Because there is, plain and simply, far more in life than science. And however brilliant, the kid has the right to experience all of it.

Absolutely agree.  Software developers I've met who skipped college to just start working possess the hard programming skills necessary to do that, but are often missing perspective and wisdom that would've been gained through gen-ed history, humanities, sciences.  Just being able to do the job isn't really enough in this world; one must be able to understand and work with others, and be able to see the consequences of one's own choices.

I disagree with this. People aged 15-18 are not "kids", and the notion that they are is historically, biologically, etc., incoherent mythology. Young people should be cultivated and practice making their own decisions. But this at least involves having the option to go to college when they the time is right, and having open discussions about it with their family.

Would you like your extraordinary talented kid to sit, bored senseless,  through 2 or more years of lessons on stuff they already know? Want them to to become disillusioned about the education system and lose their love of learning? That's the flip side of this argument. Many schools, even top ones, are not geared to provide the kind of engagement such students can be craving.

@DanielR.Collins Perhaps the wording is indeed infortunate. Substitute "kids" for "teens".

Inertia.
In most parts of the US, going to college requires being able to do other above-the-age-of-majority things like signing leases, handling major transport, etc. There's no to little support base for underage students at most universities. In large university towns like Austin, Texas, USA, where I live, there is a program in place for advanced high school students to go to the local community college (ACC) in place of some of their high school courses to get a leg up on attending the University of Texas at Austin. This program has been in place for decades and works well. Students may still live at home and attend both their regular school and ACC while keeping their support base intact.
I attended an early entrance program that served as my last two years of high school and my first two years of university. These programs aren't common in the US, but there are several.

For what it's worth, I taught 3 years at a high school similar to the one you attended (LSMSA), and both your remarks and the comments elsewhere here by both you and @SSS (about maturity and other non-academic issues) are on target.

It's not even all because of the university, but a result of all of the systems around it. IIRC you have to have a diploma or GED before getting US federal financial aid, and some states have an age requirement for getting a GED. My family ran into that problem.

@Nathan, which is why TAMS, LSMSA, and other similar programs are special. They come from special legislation in their respective states that set them up and mandated how the money works. TAMS students need only pay room and board, for example, while the state pays the UNT tuition.

Really? I started college before age 18, and that did not even factor into my decision about which school to attend. Did I just happen to get lucky in attending a school where it wasn't a problem? (More generally, I don't think it's that unusual for people to turn 18 during their freshman year, and I've never heard of it being an issue.)

@ruakh, in the US, 17-year-olds often need parents to cosign leases, etc. in order to get them. Contracts with minors are voidable so many landlords won't take the risk. It is common for underage students to start college, but it helps to have mom or dad handy. Also, living in a dorm is not unusual for a year or two and can be a different sort of contract which may have mom or dad on the hook (via tuition) already.

"Why do most talented children still enter college after the age of 18?"
The reasons why are simple.

Discipline: Studying for classes that you're not interested in, like your bachelor-core courses, takes a lot of self-control. How many of us have sat there, voicing in our heads something along the lines of, "Why do I have to take this !$@# course?!?!" Little 10 year-old Olivia may be able to perform integrals in her head like it's nobody's business, and she may even read a math textbook before bedtime as if it were the next Harry Potter novel, but that sure as hell doesn't mean she's going to enjoy Introduction to American History, let alone have the discipline to avert her math-fueled attention to it... And then follow through with the weekly required reading of 50-100 pages... And then write four to six 4-page essays throughout the term of the course. The "boring" classes are relatively easy in high school; not so much in college.
Maturity: I could already write a book on how society pressuring kids to join college right out of high school is remarkably cruel; I couldn't even imagine that same pressure on a 14 year old. The decision to go to college is a big one and thus should only be left up to the individual. Even if a child or teenager is intellectually prepared for advanced academics, that doesn't mean that they are mature enough for it. College is where many learn the value of having strong ethics in collaboration, taking pride in our work, and preserving integrity within ourselves; most young individuals will miss this lesson, even if they attend the lecture.
Additionally, as a parent, I could imagine that the idea of sending your teenager to spend a majority of their daylight hours with people who are mostly of ages 18 through 24 probably doesn't sound too inviting. That's not selfish  on the parent; it's their job to protect the child.
Knowledge: Being talented doesn't mean you're naturally gifted in everything, especially people skills. Success in college takes more than just being a savant; it demands effective communication, handling intensely stressful situations with grace (at least most of the time), and knowing how to be an adult. There are the few exceptional younglings that can deal with all of that, but as your question reveals, most can't (because they don't have the knowledge on how to).

I teach computer science for a living, at a small college. In my experience, about half of the 18-year-olds that I see just aren't ready for college. They still need someone to wake them up in the morning, to make sure that they're not spending all their time playing games and slacking off, etc. So many of them drop out after a year, since they're just wasting their time and their parents' money. Lowering the age would only make the situation worse.
(Of course, there are gifted 17-year-olds and 16-year-olds who are ready for college. But those people are the exception, not the rule.)

Many of them do, actually. They attend early college high school at two-year community college. Instead of attending traditional high school, gifted secondary students will get their high school diplomas along with college credit or even two-year associate's degrees that totally knock out the general education courses required to earn a bachelor's. In my state, most two-year schools offer these early college programs. As of 2010, they enrolled one in five of the nation's early college students.
According to Wikipedia, early college programs actually started here in North Carolina. The initiative to encourage two-year schools to adopt these programs was funded initially by the Gates Foundation around 2002. They have since become increasingly common nationally in the US, and now enroll students in 26 states. Presently, over 50,000 students attend early college.
I think the early college programs find a unique balance between providing a 'normal' high school experience with other young teenagers who still live with their parents, without sacrificing the opportunity to start earning college credit for students who are totally capable of doing so.
Personally, I dropped out of high school junior year, got a high school diploma from community college in a few months, and started working on my associate's in what would have been my senior year of high school. Every path is different.

Correction: That one specific “Early College High School Initiative” program was started in 2002 with help from Gates Foundation. But early-access-to-college programs existed decades before that.

Before the great depression, there was no typical age for entering college.  During the great depression, politicians moved to encourage people to stay in secondary school longer as a way to reduce the size of the labor pool.  This was an artificial way to reduce the unemployment rate.  That is why most people start college at the age of 18.

References for that?

Incorrect Assumption
You assume there is no early access to colleges, but that is not correct.
For decades now in the United States (at least) many colleges and universities have offered early access. Some of the various ways are described below.
High School Completion programs
“Junior admits” is becoming more common where high school students who’ve have passed sufficient number of courses in the important academic fields get admitted as a college freshman, thereby skipping their senior year in high school.
State governments may grant a High School Diploma after the student has spent several months in college.
For example, Shoreline Community College describes their High School Completion program:

Students in this program take classes and make preparations for completing a high school diploma and transferring to university at the same time. This allows students to begin their college-level studies early and go on to finish their four-year degree early too.

Some even let the student skip up to two years of high school. For example, Seattle Central College has such a High School Completion program.
Another example is the UW Academy program, for gifted High School students to attend the University of Washington.
Dual Credit programs
Some states let high school students take community college classes during the summer quarter (when their high school is on hiatus) or even parallel along with attending high school. The college course may replace some of the high school courses.
For example, the State of Washington has a few of these Dual Credit programs.
Also described in the answer by sig_se_v.
Coordinated Feeder Programs
The Matteo Ricci College is a program where a Jesuit university coordinates its curriculum with local high schools. At the end of their Junior year, successful students are admitted into the university for a continuous Humanities program, skipping senior year in high school.
College Credit for High School classes
High schoolers may earn college credit without leaving campus through either of two popular programs. Google/Bing “AP vs IB” to read many comparisons.
Advanced Placement
Many high schools offer Advanced Placement courses where students potentially earn college credits while staying within the walls of their high school building. Commonly called “AP classes”.
International Baccalaureate
Similar to Advanced Placement in some ways are some programs offered by the International Baccalaureate (IB).

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Can't handle the stress while being bombarded with questions during the presentation
I am a fashion designer student. I have given numerous presentations but one thing always bothers me: the level and frequency of questions by the questioners. By that I mean some folks in the class ask difficult questions sometimes which makes me a little nervous. And by frequency I mean repeatedly getting questions from folks esp. when teacher has left for a while and there is a mayhem in the hall.
I want an answer where those two things are addressed specifically.
Any good tips in handling such situation? Thanks.

"Excellent question" (double-level entendre intended)

Don't forget to breathe. ;)

Are you presenting when they ask questions? Are lots-of-questions normal for your class, or do you think there is an element of bullying here? How often does your teacher leave in the middle of class? I am aware of the irony in asking all these questions...

In this situation, you're a presenter and you're getting bombarded with questions, is this right? Are people incessantly asking questions and not letting you answer, or do you just feel this way because you shut down in front of the audience?
First, relax, because as the presenter, you have the floor, and you should thus be in control of the room. This mentality has helped me in the past because if you're presenting, pending time limitations, you're the highest authority in the room aside from the chair/professor, and you're free to speak at your own pace, discuss things in your preferred order, etc. Others should respect this, and remembering this gives you power.
Pace yourself, and take time to think. If someone interrupts you, etc. tell them that you'd like to answer the previous question before you get to them. Stand tall, and crossing your arms behind your back helps posture to an extent, and try to not focus on one person in particular as you answer questions. Watching their reactions can be intimidating.
Just make sure to not focus on the people asking questions or how you feel about questions, but rather on how you feel about where you are in describing what you wanted to talk about.
Edit: If you don't have an answer, that is also fine, and never be afraid to say "I don't know". This is still part of the presentation, and that is what you have to offer. If you don't like not knowing it, ask the person asking the question if they can give you their information so you can follow up with an answer later.

The answer is: crowd control.
You have to establish yourself as in-control forthright.  This can be difficult to do, but it is important to establish that YOU are in control.  The first time someone blurts out a question, just say: 'i have a lot to get through, we can take questions later'.  Most likely the audience will comply.
As for difficult questions (that I assume you cannot answer): listeners respect people who can honestly say they do not know the answer to a question.  It demonstrates character. Better yet, take that difficult question, admit you do not know, but state that you know how to get the answer, and thank them for their astute observation.

I agree with practice, but it may be better to start in a more comfortable environment. Form a practice talk group with some of your fellow students. Give each talk to the group before it is due for presentation to the whole class.
You can begin by only asking each other easy questions, and not too many, then gradually work up.

As you are a student, it is not a shame to say that you don't know the answer
According to my experience, it is always better to say the truth rather than saying something wrong that could put you in a more difficult situation.
Probably, when you say something wrong, you will feel that you say something wrong and this will probably increase more your stress and also there is another risk that other people in audience react as you say something wrong.
It is better to take a little notebook and a pen. When you feel that you can not answer the question. You can take your pen and notebook and say something like
"Good point, I did not think about it, I will think about it."
It is not a shame to not know something, we can not know everything so better is to be honest and show to audience that you are open to learn and progress. For me, this works always.

"Fake it 'til you make it" may do good work here. Observe people who are cool as cucumbers faced with this situation. (Do not omit your instructors, many of whom have dealt with question barrages -- occasionally hostile ones, at that -- for years or even decades.) See if you can work out useful verbal or postural techniques they use to manage the questions. When it's your turn, be like them -- pretend you ARE them if it helps!
If stereotype threat is part of the issue here because you are part of an underrepresented demographic in your field, remind yourself that you are unique, with your own unique and valuable take on things. Somewhat-preliminary research suggests this is helpful.

This sort of thing improves with practice.  That is why you were assigned to do it.  Keep doing it and it will get better.

Yes, but it's hard to get better or practice if you feel like you're not up to the challenge and flounder whenever something like that comes up. "what doesn't kill you makes your stronger" is a good mentality but is it really constructive at the onset of learning to answer questions in this context?

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What material should I bring to my first meeting/interview with my prospective advisor?
During a very brief email exchange, a professor of my university (mathematician) said that he is available to take on a masters student at the moment and gave me an appointment during his office hours.
Roughly in the same spirit as the question How much detail to include in first email to potential PhD supervisor?, I'd like to ask

What kind of "support material" should I bring to this "interview" to make sure the professor collects a sufficient (and sufficiently well-organized) amount of information?

I mean, in addition to the basics, which are

a copy of my CV;
a copy of my trascript;
a concise summary of my mathematical background that is relevant to the (possible) thesis topic with precise references to courses, workshops, conferences, summer schools, and the books or papers I've read.

Haven't you already sent your CV, transcript etc. to this prospective advisor?

@MassimoOrtolano: No; in my first email, I've only expressed interest in the research area (giving a little bit of my background knowledge) and in working with him; to this, he replied only that he is available to take on students and fixed an appointment for me.

Speaking as one whose office often deserves disaster-area designation, I think bringing a copy along anyway is eminently wise. :)

It looks like you're set with respect to material things. What I would encourage you to prepare is an agenda -- which, in this case, means a set of immediately practical questions you need answers to, and one or two conversation-starters regarding your would-be advisor's research and that of his existing advisees.
Practical questions: what paperwork is involved in formalizing the arrangement, when should you report to start work, that sort of thing.
Conversation starters: "I read your recent 'Mathematical Models of Baskets' in the Journal of Underwater Basketweaving; are you still working on that?" "What are your current students working on, and is there anything you wish somebody would tackle?" and that sort of thing.

I would also recommend writing this agenda down. Get a list of questions you would want to ask your prospective advisor and the list of points you want to touch in the conversation. You will likely be too anxious or excited during the talk to keep these points in mind.

An excellent point!

I was hoping we had a question here on "Questions to ask a potential advisor" to refer you to, but I couldn't find it. But one question I suggest you ask is: What is your policy for determining authorship of publications?

@mhwombat, you choose: What are the right questions to ask professors? What should I ask my potential PhD advisor?


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ACS Style image citation
I'm trying to cite an online image that I am using for a chemical literacy review. It is required to use ACS style, but the style guide makes no mention of images per se. I therefore tried to cite it using the "General web site" format. Is there a correct way to do this?
Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slaapbol_R0017601.JPG (accessed April 15, 2016).

From the ACS Style Guide, regarding the correct format for citations of websites (quote slightly reformatted):

Recommended format for general web sites:
Author (if any). Title of Site. URL (accessed Month Day, Year), other identifying information (if any). Use the title found on the Web site itself; add the words “Home Page” for clarification when needed.
...
ACS Publications Division Home Page. http://pubs.acs.org (accessed Nov 7, 2004).
Chemical Abstracts Service. STN on the Web. http://stnweb.cas.org (accessed Nov 7, 2004).
International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Home Page. http://www.iupac.org/dhtml_home.html (accessed April 24, 2005).
...
Recommended format for documents retrieved from institutional or agency web sites:
Author 1; Author 2; Author 3; etc. Title of Document, Year. Title of Site. URL (accessed Month Day, Year). If an article is contained within a large and complex Web site, such as that for a university or a government agency, the host organization and the relevant program or department should be identified before giving the direct URL of the article and accession date.
Chou, L.; McClintock, R.; Moretti, F.; Nix, D. H. Technology and education: New wine in new bottles: Choosing pasts and imagining educational futures, 1993. Columbia University Institute for Learning Technologies Web site. http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/papers/newwine1.html (accessed Aug 24, 2000)

In your case, I would considering citing it as a document, so it would become:

KGM007, Opium pod cut to demonstrate fluid extraction1, 2006, Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Opium_pod_cut_to_demonstrate_fluid_extraction1.jpg (accessed Feb 17, 2018)

You could cite it as a web page - that would look like this:

KGM007, File:Opium pod cut to demonstrate fluid extraction1.jpg - Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Opium_pod_cut_to_demonstrate_fluid_extraction1.jpg (accessed Feb 17, 2018)

In your citation, you gave the name of the site, not the title. The title (as defined by the HTML title tag) is what shows in the top of your web browser when you visit the page:
If you intend to submit this for publication, the publisher should check and confirm the format during production anyhow.


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Citation policies: original papers or recent monographs?

When referencing previous results, should one cite the original
  paper(s) or a recent comprehensive monograph?

Specifically, in my area of interest (a relatively recent branch of mathematics), in the last ten years, several monographs have been published (by different authors) which cover (virtually) all "classical" results and most of contemporary developements organizing them, putting them in their context, and offering extensive references to the original papers.
To clarify my position: for the sake of "culture", I've read a few of the original papers in which the results I use most often appear for the first time; however, for the benefit of the reader, I'd rather cite only the most recent (and most comprehensive) source (and possibly point the reader to the additional references therein); in my department, there are researchers following either policies.

please someone relate this to this question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/65892/citing-old-or-new-papers-of-same-work

@beta: that question is somewhat related, but is radically different.

Why not cite both?

The following theorem is due to Doe [37]; see also [28] for a modern exposition and further background.

Here [37] might be Doe's original paper, and [28] the recent monograph.
Math journals rarely have page limits, so there's no disadvantage to including more citations.  This way you credit the original author and also point the reader to the resource you think will be most helpful.

It may seem a little redundant, but I agree that it is still the best choice. Thank you.

This is pretty much also what I do with a lot of results, at least the ones I state in full. When I only cite a result as part of a proof, it would become too cumbersome to cite more than one source (I am not very consistent with which I choose to cite in these cases).

The point of citations is to allow your work to be repeated. Therefore you must cite the materials you used. Consider if the recent monograph [28] had an error: if you cited the original [37] then that would be most unfair to people repeating you work. In the worst case that annoyed person attempting to repeat your work might publish a letter pointing out that your results could not have been acheived from your citations. That's a hair's breadth from being accused of misconduct.
However you also need to be fair to your reader. Imagine a reader who has tracked down hard-to-find monograph [28], painfully translated the relevant passages, and found it was merely an exposition of Doe [37].
You must cite the monograph. You may also cite the original paper.

That's not the only point of citations. Citations are also meant to give credit.


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Math: Perception of only or mostly doing research in Master's for Ph.D. admission folks
Background: I'll be starting a 1.5 - 2 year master's program in mathematics this coming Fall in the US. Because of my non-degree graduate courses relevant to the program and my research interest, I can easily fulfill the requirements of this program within a year. However, my main goal is to gain and tangible research experience in preparation for a Ph.D program so I plan to remain in this program for 2 years.
Question: Will my application to Ph.D programs and fellowships be diluted if admissions folks see that my second year in this Master's program consisted mostly of research with at most one class per semester?
I want to reduce the course load as much as possible in order to give me time and flexibility to do research with the benefit of less tuition fees (if any). However, this all would be moot if such decision would raise red flags among admission committees.
Besides focusing more on research than classes, any other things I should look into while in this program?

For what it's worth, pretty much everyone I knew in graduate school (mathematics) seemed far more concerned with passing the Ph.D. Qualifying exams than with research. This is also where there was a high failure rate, not with the writing of the Dissertation. In fact, I believe every single person who passed the Ph.D. exams when (and where) I did wound up completing a Dissertation. I've heard the situation can be quite different in the humanities, however. That said, there is still the matter of what admissions committees like, and I'll leave this to others who know more about it than me.

Is this taking place in the US?  A "master's in math" means something very different in the US versus elsewhere.

@PeteL.Clark The program does take place in the US. I apologize, for not mentioning at start.

Background: I am the director of graduate admissions in the pure math department of my university.

EDIT: since this is still getting upvoted ~7 years later, I should remark that since I wrote it I moved to a different university and am no longer very involved with graduate admissions (every department has different service needs, and I've decided that it's more useful at the moment for me to do other things).  I still basically agree with what I said, though the trend seems to be for the GRE to become optional and even when it is required for its score to carry less weight.  I personally never thought it was particularly useful, but mentioned it since some people care about it a lot.

In my experience, we basically ignore "research" conducted by undergraduate and masters students (unless is it truly remarkable, in which case you will almost certainly not need advice on the internet to get into a strong PhD program).  It just isn't a good predictor of whether or not you will be successful in a PhD program.  You will get very different advice from people who are not mathematicians, but you should ignore it -- graduate programs in math are very different from graduate programs in the other sciences.  This advice also might not apply if you are applying to departments of applied mathematics.
What we care about are

The courses you have taken, and
Your grades, and
Your letters of recommendation, and
Your GRE scores.

The above list is un-ordered; different members of the committee weight the above factors differently.

For PhD programs in pure math in the US...yes, this is absolutely dead on.

Thanks for your answer especially on the perspective I cared about. Your point that math is "very different" from other sciences being the most important.

@PeteL.Clark Though, there is an important addendum: working on a research project with a faculty member and doing a good job, even if the level of the research is not high, can improve your letters.

@BenWebster: You do have to be a little careful, however.  For instance, my experience is that letters from REU supervisors are often not very helpful.

I have read a few really convincing ones.  The people who run the top REUs (Williams, Duluth, etc.) have probably seen more extremely talented undergrads than any other mathematicians out there, and thus are in a good position to compare.  I suspect many letters are not that helpful because many students at REUs don't actually do a good job.

@Ben: I agree with the above comments.  What I would say to " I suspect many letters are not that helpful because many students at REUs don't actually do a good job." is...I honestly don't know what it means for a student at an REU to do a "good job."  I know what it means for them to do a poor job -- that they end up not successfully engaging with the material [this can of course still be a valuable experience for them].  I know what it means for them to do an exceptionally excellent job: they do significant research and do a significant part of it on their own....

The problem is that those who run REUs are highly pressured to portray these REUs as successful: the very future of the REUs depends on this.  This used to mean that almost all letters about REU students described the student in extremely, sunny complimentary terms.  It seems to me that it now means even more than that: the letters talk about the theorems the student has proven and the papers the student has written...and I confess that in many cases I do not believe the student had a primary or even significant role in this work.  So: yes, it's hard for an REU letter to really impress me.

Hi, can you have a look at this (pretty related) question: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/163339/does-scut-work-contribution-to-a-paper-as-a-math-undergrad-carry-weightage-in

Let me complement @Andy Putman's answer with a perspective from applied math.  I'm on the admissions committee of a graduate program in applied math and I've advised MS thesis students who have gone on to top applied math programs.
Research at the Master's level can have a very positive impact on your application, if it is substantive and especially if it leads to publication in a respected journal, or if it enables your letter writers who supervised the research to give stronger evaluations of you.
Research that merely involves, say, implementing a known algorithm and applying it to a slightly different problem may not be given much weight.  Research that is presented in a sloppy way can even be a negative.
But top MS students are often able to do research of high caliber in applied math.  For instance, some of my MS students already had one or two high-quality papers accepted to journals like SISC and SINUM; partly as a result of this, they had their pick of top doctoral programs.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Citing medium of access for a book in MLA
I'm trying to write an essay with the following MLA citation in the bibliography:

Hoffman, Conrad. In the Prison Camps of Germany: A Narrative of "Y" Service among Prisoners of War. New York: Association,  1920. Print.

After reviewing it, my teacher posted the following comment:

Be sure to include the medium of access.

The resource in question was virtualized via Google. How do I represent the medium of access in an MLA citation for a virtualized book?

Your teacher is wrong

According to the Purdue Online Writing Lab, which is usually a good source for such things, journal articles that are available both online and in print should be cited based on which medium you actually used to access the article:

Article in an Online Scholarly Journal That Also Appears in Print
Cite articles in online scholarly journals that also appear in print as you would a scholarly journal in print, including the page range of the article. Provide the medium of publication that you used (in this case, Web) and the date of access.

I would thus anticipate that the same principle should be applied to a scanned book.  Even though the original was generated long before the web existed, you accessed it through the web today, and since you are recording publication medium, that's the publication medium by which it was actually delivered to you.


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How well is "I want to do research at a big company" received during a PhD application?
Is it somehow "taboo" to mention planning on leaving Academia™ after having finished one's PhD program?-- I've been at a couple of interviews for PhD positions at which the following question was asked (or a variant thereof):

What do you want to do after getting your PhD?

My answer was:

I want to either find a dedicated research position at a company big enough to offer such (e.g. Google) and/or work as an independent consultant for different companies.

The follow-up question was always:

Why do you want to work in industry instead of at university?

In both cases, my answer was:

Getting a job at uni would be great, but planning my future on getting a tenure-track position is not a good idea and I don't want to spend ten years moving from city to city for temporary/adjunct positions.

Since I'm still looking for a PhD position, my interview skills are not the best; Is this the wrong approach to a question like this?

Given that you told us in other questions that you have been in industry for a while. Is it your impression that it's not hard for a PhD to find a dedicated research position at a company big enough?

I would assume that it's easier to find a permanent research position at a company with permanent research departments in several countries rather than at a university which relies on project-related research grants; That doesn't mean that it's "not hard".

Tenure-track positions and research positions at big companies are two different things. It depends  on your field and your research area. I am not sure which one is easier than the other one.

Who trademarked "Academia"?

It is taboo, though its severity is much less so in applied fields rather than theoretical ones.

Try to read your answer from the position of somebody in academia. Would you be impressed by your answers?

As a general tip, in my experience the best way to answer these questions is to be adamant about your work / research and flexible about positions. That is, explain what work you want to do and indicate flexibility about where and in which function you would want to work on it. Giving up on a traditional academic career while applying for an entry-level academic position will sound strange, but indicating that nothing except being a professor at CMU will work for you will also sound like you are bound to fail.

There is no taboo, but your answer was not very good.
Here are some specific problems:

Your answer implies an unwillingness to bear hardship.  You don't want the life of an adjunct professor.  But you are starting a PhD, and PhD students arguably have a similar sort of life.  Are you willing to deal with five years of low or no pay and very hard work?  Do you have a realistic idea of what that will take?  They might not be convinced that you do, based on this response.
The answer might be taken as denigrating the life choices of the person you are talking to.  The person interviewing probably had a career path similar to what you just described and you are essentially saying that would be a bad choice to make.  This might not come across so well.
Your answer focused on the kind of position rather than the content of the work you want to do.  There is some anti-industry bias in academia, but neither "I want to work as a consultant" nor "I want to be a professor" is a very good answer, honestly.  At this stage they want to know that you are passionate about the research.  Therefore you should focus on what you want to do rather than where.
Your answer may undermine your story about leaving industry.  You had a period of soul-searching that led you to leave industry for PhD study, but then you want to go right back to industry and aren't even interested in academic opportunities?  This will make it harder to convince them that you really are committed to this new direction.

My advice is be honest while trying to emphasize the most positive aspect of your honest opinion.
I would focus on what kind of research you really want to do with your PhD degree, and give an answer based on that.  The location of the work should be based on the opportunity to do the type of work you want.
If your honest answer is "I want to cure cancer and save lives, and I'm willing to work in industry or academia to make that happen" then great.  If your answer is "I want to work on self-driving cars, and industry is the place to be for that", then that is a fine answer.
If you don't have a defined idea of what you want to study and just want a generic sort of career in "research" I would rethink whether you are really ready to start a PhD.


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Any recourse for testing on material not mentioned in the class syllabus?
In one particular university class, many people stopped attending after about half the semester was over as the professor was "confusing" as many people phrased it and opted to instead study from the textbook. The course syllabus outlines the chapters in the textbook that would be subject to testing.
The class does not have an attendance policy. It is not recorded, though powerpoints are posted, and you would not get a rundown of what occurred in class in case of absence since the textbook and powerpoints are available.
Near the end of the course, a new topic not found in the lecture slides or textbook was brought up for approximately 10 minutes(each lecture is 1.5hours). I was not in attendance that day. The topic was not mentioned in the syllabus, no online announcement was made that an extra topic was added.
This topic was then put on the final exam as a question of its own. Later, on group pages, students who attended class mentioned that the topic was not explained well at the time, but the professor did say "at least you'll have an advantage on the final over the absent students". Many people sent e-mails to the prof and none have heard back yet.
Is there any recourse now in terms of marks or having the question removed in your opinion? Furthermore, could you provide on brief response as to whether you think the prof was justified in doing this?

Voted to close. Not a site for undergraduate issues.

At first glance, this is asking us to justify your decision to stop attending the course. At second glance, you are asking us if a syllabus could possible contain a listing of all information that would be passed on in a course. Presuming that the topic was in some way associated with the rest of the course, yes it would be valid to put on a test. You are not regurgitating facts from the lectures or text book, you are supposed to learn how to use information to synthesize a response to questions in the field.

I often reward my students who attend class with insights into what I am likely to put on an exam. Further, if in response to a student's question, I elaborate on something off topic or probe an existing topic in greater detail, it also becomes fair game for the test. You have no recourse whatsoever.

The complaint is at best a quasi-legalistic, anti-educational complaint, as though education, study were merely a game with artificial rules. Gimme-a-break...

Thank you for all your input. I was personally doing fine in the course(aside from the one thing) and learned more through the textbook than in class which was why I stopped attending. I just needed to know if this could be contested or if it were really up to the professor assuming how he feels about any received emails. The top comment says this isnt the site for undergrad issues though so I will shortly delete the question. This was an intro course dealing with very basic stats. Most people, even those who attended class were bothered by a 10 minute blurb being a standalone question.

Before I close this, is there any advice I could give to people who were legitimately sick and missed that one lecture. I do feel the worst about them.

In one particular university class, many people stopped attending after about half the semester was over as the professor was "confusing" as many people phrased it and opted to instead study from the textbook.

In retrospect, I hope you see the flaw in this approach. If your instructor is confusing about something, you go speak to them, in person, to get to the bottom of the things that are confusing to you. Your instructors are there to teach you this stuff because a majority of students are not adept enough to do it on their own.

The course syllabus outlines the chapters in the textbook that would be subject to testing.

Well, in my syllabi I say something like "this outline is tentative, and subject to change." Assuming your instructor did not have this disclaimer in the syllabus: too bad. A syllabus isn't a legal contract. You'll know better next time.
It would be "nice" if instructors could always think of every little thing to put in a syllabus so that whiny students who don't bother showing up, etc. wouldn't come and complain about how a lack of effort on their part was somehow someone else's fault but their own.

Is there any recourse now in terms of marks or having the question removed in your opinion? Furthermore, could you provide on brief response as to whether you think the prof was justified in doing this?

I do think your instructor was justified. However, I'd also like to point out that you have options, if you really do think you were not given a fair exam. For example, you could go and talk to the course instructor about it (you know, like you should have when the course got to be "confusing").
I hope more than anything that you learn a valuable lesson here: when things don't go your way, don't look around to find someone else to blame — take ownership of your actions.

I personally didn't find the course confusing. I just thought the prof wasn't any good. Little time was spent on the slides and most of it was spent on a single(or if lucky 2) simple questions from the textbook. Meaning the bulk of the class material was at best a half hour, which was less than a quarter of my commute time. Sucks to be me I guess. Thanks for your input though. I'll look into emailing him, I just needed to know if there was any administrative recourse that could be had.

I disagree that this approach is in general a solution. I had many courses which were confusing - but in an unreparable way, like "not even wrong". Say a prof who permantely forgets to finish their homework assignment sentences in a senseful way (and was approached 100 times about it). Or one who does only read their notes and gets unfriendly when you dare to ask a thing. Or who starts to answer questions with a variant of "you are really stupid, but I am so nice to answer this one" After some time it gets so frustrating you learn by reading the books, if any..


text:
Will a post on arXiv as a high school sophomore hurt my future academic life?
I am a high school sophomore student who is very passionate about the subject of number theory and college level calculus. However, I am currently only in the high school class of precalculus/trig. The paper contains material beyond high school calculus, but am afraid that it would not be good enough for an actual arXiv paper.  Here are a few important facts to consider about my particular situation.

(The math side) The proof is basically a non-summation proof of an inequality between an integral and a constant. By "non-summation" I mean like, if you have a sum of infinite terms, you are not allowed to approximate using 1000000 terms or whatever. This implies more strategic methods, no use of any obvious approximation methods like trap rule, and most importantly, in my opinion,  why I feel it good enough.
I feel that this is not necessarily good enough for arXiv because I am not proving some general result, have 0 co-authors, and very limited assistance on the subject.
I currently have no people to endorse, but quite confident I can achieve one (connections).
If this is too low level, I am afraid that this might mar writing papers in the future, my credibility, etc.
I have an unused arXiv account, which I doubt will be harmful (side question: will it?)

But, Ok, let's assume that I manage to pull this off during the summer. Assuming the paper is written fair enough, but about the content I am talking about, would writing the paper hurt my academic life down the road?

Oh, also, my Arx account is "independent researcher" currently, which I forgot to mention. Can this be changed?

Have you shown your work to any mathematicians?

I can't help but notice that you have given several points against posting a paper on the arxiv but not a single point in favor.  I honestly don't see why this is something a high school student needs to worry about, in roughly the same way that you don't have to worry about whether to get a mortgage or what kind of retirement plan to choose.  You are not a professional mathematician trying to advance your career...and it doesn't make sense (to me, a professional mathematician) that you would want to act like one at the moment.  That can happen 10 years later if you are still interested.

geometrikal I am planning to. What is nice is that my current teacher is a mathematician, and I will show it to her. (Actual mathatician) as to Pete L. Clark, I am interested for needless to say a stupid reason: I want to share my ideas on a formal level. Like previously stated, I am just very interested in math.

@AAron: There are many platforms for sharing your ideas: you could make a blog, for instance.  The arxiv is for preprints, i.e., advance copies of papers to be published in research journals.  It's great that you're interested in math: since you are now taking precalculus, you have essentially all of your mathematical life ahead of you.  You should keep learning and reading about math, and if you want to do math over the summer you should attend a program surrounded by other people who are interested in and talented at math (there are many such programs)....

....Isn't it true that even if you've done something already that might be novel and publishable in some form, whatever you'll do 1,2,3,4,...years from now will necessarily be much better?  If so, why the rush to insert yourself in a professional forum when you yourself have already expressed the worry that this could impede your future professional life?

...  In summary: you are a 14-16 year old who is really interested in mathematics and is probably very talented at it.  Why try to impersonate a 25-30 year old who feels pressured to publish something of relatively little value?  Being a great teenager is better -- and easier, and more appropriate, and more fun -- than being a subpar professional.

@Pete You make an extremely excellent point, and I will definitely follow it. Thank you.

@PeteL.Clark Can you please convert these comments into an answer that I can vote for?

@PeteL.Clark Can you please turn your comments into an answer, so that I can vote for it?

Keep in mind that posting to arXiv is not completely open. If you don't have the proper institutional affiliation (and occasionally even if you do) you'll be required to get an endorsement before you can post. If you are able to secure an endorsement with the paper then the odds that it is embarrassing are rather lower than otherwise.

I suggest looking into publications that specifically target high school or undergraduate students. An example, but one that unfortunately no longer exists, is The Mathematics Student Journal (sample issue from 1971). A current one is Pi Mu Epsilon Journal. An organization that I've been involved with both as a student (mid 1970s) and as a teacher (late 1990s) is Mu Alpha Theta. These are USA based, but your teacher should know some appropriate for you.

Involve, from the publishers of Geometry and Topology, is another good option for high school and college students with publishable results to consider.  Though notice that it requires significant oversight by a faculty member.

A downside of this route is that most of these journals (I think Crux Mathematicorum also belongs on that list) are not open-access, and not many people actually have access to them. This doesn't make publication wrong per se, but it might make it a worse option than posting on your website or on github/gitlab/... -- after all, you want people to read your work (people are increasingly hard to convince by cats in bags). You should definitely keep an accessible preprint around.

@darij grinberg: I just saw your comment (I've been away a couple of days), and I agree. In fact, I'm surprised they aren't open-access for the purpose of promoting the study of mathematics. I guess the needs of subscription money to keep the operations running prevent this.

I suggest finding some friendly mathematician in the relevant field at a local college and ask them for their opinion on your work. Introduce yourself briefly in a mail, with an outline of the issue you would like to discuss and see whether you can arrange a meeting.
I do not second the suggestions to postpone publications because of youth. Not everybody is a Galois, but I know several students which at high-school age had publication-worthy results which they never published.
Rather, I suggest to subject OP's result to a reality check, to see whether it holds water and is new and sufficiently non-trivial/interesting. If it is, go ahead and publish.

It is very difficult for a high school student to determine whether a result is original and interesting enough to experts to be publishable.  To make the point even clearer, when I was a highschool student I had a paper that I published (under the advice of a mathematician who suggested the problem to me) but I wasn't yet able to tell the difference between publishable and non-publishable results on my own!  Furthermore, the math that I did on my own (which I really enjoyed and was valuable for my mathematical development, and which even did ok in highschool science fairs) was not something publishable.
I haven't seen what you've written, but the odds are very low that it's publishable in a math journal.  But that's ok!  You can talk about it with your teacher and learn more stuff.  You could submit it to a highschool science fair.  You could talk about it with other highschoolers interested in math at a summer program or a forum like AoPS.  Smart highschool students thinking about math just aren't the main audience of research math journals or the arxiv, but that doesn't mean that the math that smart highschool students come up with doesn't have its own places.


text:
How to cite Andy Warhol's Marilyn
In one of the images I made to illustrate my PhD thesis, I included a "Marilyn" by Andy Warhol (image below), and I cannot find the museum/collection where the painting is exhibited. How should I cite it? Should I change the painting?

Is this social sciences or image processing?  If the latter, you should credit the original painting but the more important citation is of the digitization you used as your algorithm input.

The original of this piece (the Marilyn Diptych) is held in the Tate Gallery in London.
Your question is rather serendipitous as in two days you can buy your own Warhol original print from the screen at auction. The sale prints were recently exhibited at the Rockefeller Centre.
I would cite the art work in the following manner:

Warhol, Andy (1962), Marilyn Diptych, Silkscreen on Canvas, Tate Gallery, London.

References:
(1) Wikipedia (2016), Marilyn Diptych, [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Diptych, [Accessed 1 May 2016]
(2) Tate Gallery Illustrated Companion (2016), Marilyn Diptych 1962, [online] http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/warhol-marilyn-diptych-t03093/text-illustrated-companion [Accessed 1 May 2016]

I'm not so sure. Warhol did several Marilyn silkscreens, and the one at the Tate seems to be a different color scheme. I know I also saw some originals at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Also, I wouldn't cite the original. Just as you need to cite facsimile reprints as such, this should be as well, unless they took a picture or scanned the original themself.


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How to follow up with a professor on graduate school admissions decision
I applied for graduate admission to a couple of schools and a professor from one of the schools asked me two weeks ago if I was still interested in graduate studies at his university.
I mentioned that I was still interested.
In reply, he said that he was considering me for a fellowship and that he hopes that the university administration will reply before too long.
Now, it's been two weeks and he's not gotten back to me. Should I ask him if he's received the fellowship decision yet? How should I write my email?

A follow up email is fine. Be polite and to the point.

Should I tell him that this is a follow-up email?

Yes. Either mention it in the email or just reply to the original email

I agree, it never hurts to follow up or "check on the status of your application". Feel free to offer up anything to help the process ("Please let me know if anything else is needed on my part." ). This will pull you out of the pile one extra time and let them know that you are interested and on top of things.


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What's the point of maintaining a CV after tenure?
Once you have tenure, presumably you're never going to have to search for a job again. However almost all professors have a CV on their website, and fairly recent ones. Why? They already made it.

I'm not sure I understand the close vote. This is not opinion based. A person can maintain a CV for objective reasons (grant committees look at it, etc.).

I was invited to give a talk recently. The inviting institution requested an updated CV as part of the needed paperwork for reimbursement.

Two invalid assumptions: (1) CVs are used only to search for jobs (2) You will never search for a job again.

My department asks me for an updated CV once a year.  When I visit Microsoft Research for a couple of months in the summer, they also want an up-to-date CV.

As a student who often visits the webpages of professors in my department and other departments to get basic information on them and their research, an up-to-date CV is the quickest and easiest way to get the information I'm looking for.

Upon joining the club of those who've "made it," you find that there are further gradations.  A tenured professor can safely breathe a sigh of relief for at least a year or two, but eventually she will notice (i) that her salary is lower than most of her tenured colleagues and (ii) that she is still being asked to document and defend her productivity across several axes: research, teaching and service.  (Also, in many cases, (iii) She is increasingly pressured to apply for and get major grants.  In many cases, her future salary and promotions depend on this to a large degree.)
The main tool to exhibit your recent accomplishments in research, teaching and service is...your CV, usually.  In fact, "whether they want a good raise or not," most faculty are required to submit annual "activity reports" in which a CV is often a required component.  (When it isn't, it usually means that we manually copy information from our CV into some form or type it into some internal webpage.  So having an updated CV is more or less necessary for
many faculty members.)  Certainly having a carefully groomed CV is necessary when you go up for "promotion to full", apply for an endowed chair or distinguished research position, and so forth.
The bottom line: academia has bureaucratic, competitive and hierarchical aspects all the way through.  Most people who have made it tenure in recent years have learned how to keep reasonably up-to-date CVs without too much trouble or heroic effort -- the CVs do not need to be rewritten from scratch to showcase their skills for some new job, usually, so it is mostly a matter of regular updating -- so honestly, this is not the worst part of the bureaucratic minutiae.

"Most people who have made it to tenured professors in recent years have learned how to keep reasonably up-to-date CVs without too much trouble or heroic effort " As described to me by my mentors, you just maintain a text file for each reporting year. Whenever something you can be credited for occurs you add an entry with date, description and when appropriate links. In parallel you keep a file of ephemera that can be added to your tenure/promotion/extra-recognition-thingy packet. That way you always have the data and the evidence. This also works for your progress-toward-tenure reports.

I think this addresses why we keep our CVs up to date but perhaps not why many professors put their CVs on their website.  I don't, and never saw too much point if you keep an up-to-date webpage listing your publications etc.  (I personally don't like advertising all the things on my CV to the whole world, e.g., invited talks or service activities.  The things I am willing to advertise, I put on my webpage.)

@Kimball: Well, in fact I don't think that most professors put their CVs on their webpage.  (For that matter, what is the percentage of faculty members that have a "real webpage"?  Probably less than 50%, right?) Noting that the title does not mention webpages, I took the assertion that most professors have CVs on their webpage primarily as evidence that they maintain up-to-date CVs rather than being a main part of the question itself.

Probably the OP intended the question as you interpreted it, but I've personally wondered why certain established professors who are "off the market" and have real webpages bother to also post their (often dated) CVs online.

@Kimball: Well, I am not "on the market" per se, and I post my CV online.  People do ask me for copies of my CV periodically, for various reasons, and if my webpage contains the most current copy of my CV, that makes it easier for everyone.  Also, perhaps because I do this, I don't list on my webpage certain biographical information that could be found on my CV.  For instance, if someone wants to see where I went to school, they should look at my CV.  I guess I partly like having a "no-frills" professional webpage and partly am too lazy to try to design something better.

@PeteL.Clark If people ask for your CV, maybe you can answer this question: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/155452/whats-the-point-about-cv-available-on-request/155463?noredirect=1#comment415504_155463

Some reasons that I've needed to have an up-to-date CV:

Applying for promotion to full professor.
Applying for a funding for a sabbatical leave visit to a research center.
Applying for grants.  (Most funding agencies have very specialized formatting requirements for shortened CV's.  For example, you're only allowed 2 pages for the one you submit with an NSF proposal.)
An external review of our department and its programs.

It's such a common need that I just make a point of keeping my CV up to date as new publications and other events happen.

Everybody needs a CV to help others better know them.
I am not a professor, but I think even tenured professors may maintain their CVs so as;

As an advising professor, they need to hire or accept research (PhD or masters) students,
As a university professor, they may hire PhD graduates in form of postdoc positions,
As a person working in university or industry, they need collaboration;

and for many other reasons.
They need an updated and maintained CV so as people who want to collaborate with them in a research project get know them, their research interests and their previous works or at least their educational background.
Research students need to read their CV to get familiar with their research interests and know their past PhD or masters students' projects. This helps them to better choose an adviser whose education and research background is so near to their academic interests.
These professors may also want to apply to get a project, they need a complete CV to introduce themselves to the project owners or investors.

I'm not sure if this is already covered by the existing answers, but one use for an up-to-date CV is: you may be asked to write reference letters for junior researchers seeking tenure or promotion or a higher-ranking job elsewhere, or act as a referee on someone's grant application. It is then part of the bureaucracy, and also informative, for those who wish to solicit letters from you to be able to see what you have been doing.
Note that this is not just a matter of looking up publications: a CV might include various service roles such as administration within a scholarly society, plenary talks and invited courses, and so on.

Great question! In addition to the formal, bureaucratic reasons (evaluations for grants, promotions, jobs etc.) mentioned by the other answers for why it's good to maintain a CV, and preferably a public one, let me add another, informal, reason.
In academia as in many other areas of professional endeavor, there is a kind of "the rich get richer" effect (a.k.a. a virtuous cycle, or positive feedback loop): once you are successful enough, you can leverage your successes to get more success, and the CV (and other similar forms of seemingly gratuitous self-promotion, like maintaining a web page) can play a role in reinforcing this virtuous cycle.
Here's a simple example (one among many - one can easily think of several similar situations that illustrate the same principle): I am occasionally invited to speak at conferences. The conference organizers don't have to invite me, and when they are considering whom to invite, doubtlessly they have various other ideas about possible speakers. Now, imagine that they consider either inviting me or another researcher who does work which is about as good as mine, but does not maintain a web page with easily accessible information about their research, or a CV. It is easy to imagine that all other things being equal, I will appear as a more attractive potential speaker and end up being invited, and the other researcher will not be. Then, when I eventually travel to the conference, all sorts of additional good things can happen - I may impress people by giving a good talk, and make it more likely that I can get more speaking invitations in the future; I may form new collaborations, or see an interesting talk that gives me a good research idea, etc. -- all of which are things that are likely to breed even more successes for me in the future. The virtuous cycle is reinforced, and all (hypothetically speaking) thanks to a humble PDF document of several pages that I posted online, that I can easily maintain with a minimal investment of a few minutes per quarter. Of course, we shouldn't forget that the work one does the rest of the time -- all the stuff that ends up being mentioned in one's CV -- is a lot more important and essential, but in a simple cost-benefit analysis, it's easy to see that maintaining a CV is a no-brainer.
Finally, let me also mention an unrelated psychological observation, which also answers your question but in a kind of indirect way: because the competition to get tenured professorships at good universities is so tough, this causes a selective pressure that ensures that many tenured professors are highly ambitious, competitive people. That means that they are not the sort of people to think "I've made it, now I can relax and play golf for the rest of my career"; instead, after getting tenure, many of them look ahead to see what more they can accomplish. I can assure you there is a lot more one can achieve in life than being a tenured professor. So, as others have pointed out, your basic premise that a tenured professor represents someone who has "made it" simply does not fit the psychological profile and mindset of a lot of tenured professors.

There are two wildly unrelated questions here: why keep an updated CV, and why put it on one's webpage (if one has such a thing). As in other answers, there are many reasons to have an updated CV, if only the immediate one that most (e.g., math) depts require an annual report, which is a sort of edited-down version of one's CV to include only recent things.
The question of why put it on-line is very different. Much of the information in the type of CV demanded by department heads or deans is surely of little interest to people interested in the subject, as opposed to the sociology of the milieu, or gossip. One can imagine that people are proud of prizes or invitations and such, and, indeed, this does impart a certain sort of information about the esteem in which their work is held.
But, equally surely, the essential information on a web page is the papers themselves, not the life story or prizes of the person. That assumes that the goal is making information available, as opposed to self-promotion.
So, for example, of course I have an updated CV that I prune to make my annual report, but I don't put this on-line.

This question reminds me of the parolee who resumes his life of crime as soon as he steps out the prison door. Tenure should be seen not as the end of something but the beginning of something. Everything before tenure was an effort to demonstrate how one would be once tenure is achieved, and to quit just because one has finally been admitted irreversibly to the team, betrays the team: your colleagues, the school that hired you in good faith, and more vaguely but more importantly, the field that you've committed yourself to studying. OK, I realize you're tired, you've made a superhuman effort, but that's why you've been granted such an extraordinary position. Take a sabbatical, get over it, and get to work.

I don't see what this has to do with the question and you seem to be projecting.

I don't even have a PhD, so it can hardly be projecting. Maintaining a CV is part of active involvement in one's chosen path. It's not merely a crowing sheet for finding jobs.

I agree with the OP that you are reading way too much into the original post. Lines like "OK, I realize you're tired, you've made a superhuman effort, but that's why you've been granted such an extraordinary position. Take a sabbatical, get over it, and get to work" seem very presumptuous about the motives for the original question, and the status of the person asking it

Comments are not for debate or argument, please make your point and then move on.