Three Things Exercise

Process for talks

Here is how it works. Take a clean sheet of paper, or an index card. Your goal is to have three things, and only three things, on this sheet at the end of the talk. The “things” can be of many forms:

A definition you want to remember (e.g. “a K3 surface is…”)
A theorem you want to remember (“the moduli space of polarized K3 surfaces is smooth”) a motivating or key example (“a quartic is an example of a K3 surface”)
A motivating problem (“why are all moduli spaces of polarized K3 surfaces the same dimension?”)
A question you want to ask the speaker (“why is that hypothesis in your theorem?”)
A question you want to ask someone else (a definition, motivation, a question about a connection etc.)
Anything else of a similar flavor: something specific that made you think. Something vague (“I liked the part where she talked about groups”) does not count as a “thing”.

As you watch the talk, look out for “things” you like. When one comes your way, write it down