There's a simple way to avoid forgetting about one's early work. That's to do very little of it. Steve Gray Steve Rowley writes:
Strangely, and somewhat embarassingly, there's an appendix in my old thesis on approximately this problem.
There are lots of anecdotes in mathematics about mathematicians in later life who've forgotten about work they did earlier. (I think the archetype involves Hilbert hassling a seminar-speaker about some result he used that Hilbert thought wasn't believable, and the speaker responding "Not only is it true, but you're the one who proved it!") And I'm now old enough (47) to have begun to experience this phenomenon first-hand in myself. Question: Is this phenomenon unique (or at least strongest) in math, as opposed to other scientific and/or creative disciplines? I think research in math is about building up intuitions in some mathematical domain and combining those intuitions with the tools in one's technical toolkit to solve some problems in that domain. The trouble is that intuitions have a short half-life, so even if you keep your mental tools from rusting, work you did a decade or two ago is going to seem unfamiliar, and work you did three or four decades ago might seem like the work of another person. I suspect that other fields are more intuitive, and that the projects one completes there sink deeper hooks into memory, because they are more rooted in physical reality, personal history, etc. What do you all think? (And has anyone studied the phenomonon across disciplines?) Jim Propp