If you were to meet glaive today, you might not guess he grew up in a sleepy North Carolina town. He’s thin boned, over six feet tall, and dresses like he’s trying on a type of angst that doesn’t suit him. Over the last two years, he’s constantly shifted his aesthetic. He’s flipped from shorter chestnut brown curls to longer platinum blonde to medium length but unhealthy dyed black hair.

Graphs can be seen as a way to represent pairwise relationships between objects. With graphs, we have one object type and one relationship type. In one of the most common canonical applications or graph theory, social networking, we are trying to understand and represent social groups using graphs. In that case, our object is people, our pairwise relationship is friendship, and two people have a relationship between them if they are friends.

You’ve started a new job, you’ve stumbled into a conversation that’s been happening for several decades, and you’re feeling way too lost to even begin to follow what anyone is talking about, let alone participate. You’re confused, so you go see John, who seems to be semi-acquainted with the people having the conversation. You briefly sketch out what (you think) you heard, and tell him that you didn’t really understand anything anyone said. Maybe he can help you?

One of the most useful ways I’ve found to learn about some deeply niche topic is to find a recording of a tutorial or workshop aimed at a research audience, and watch the video about 5 times slower than originally intended.

It usually makes more sense than attempting to read the papers the video is based on (and is self contained with all of the key important information), but the significant speed decrease is necessary because these research talks are freakishly information dense, and also, unlike the intended audience, I have no idea what the speaker is talking about.