@mariuszklimczak My PhD thesis is the place where I wrote all the explanations and derivations about basic stuff I keep forgetting, so I consult it regularly.
@j_bertolotti Indeed that is what I meant. I put some abstract takes in intro to my PhD thesis, but with the grads whom I advised this mistake I did correct (by syggesting them to build their intros around the basic, useful stuff).
@j_bertolotti@SvenGeier This is why I wish more PhD theses were easier to access. They're often a goldmine for explanations from people who were also, back then, first learning their fields.
@j_bertolotti
Interesting. My advisor requested weekly written activity updates: "what did you do in the last week, be as detailed as makes sense." It was perfectly OK to just write "I continued the testing started last week" or such, but what he was really after was for me to make plots of what the testing is showing so far, or properly LaTeXed equations of how I was processing my data and such. Basically whatever I had created this week - a circuit diagram or a table or data or whatever.
By the time I started actually writing a thesis document, I had directories full of plots, explanations, code to show things, graphics, ... - a lot of material that ended up much more tersely in the thesis itself. The starting point for every chapter was basically there and half the text was basically already written and where a plot wasn't quite up to snuff at least I already had some code from whence to start making a better one.
I've retained a pile of those snippets -- just this four-page document where I really went into the detail of where the electrons flow in that setup which ended up a half-paragraph in the thesis but for those weekly updates there was no limit to pages or graphs or whatever and in hindsight these have proven much more useful than the thesis itself which is really just a terse summary of the whole tree of stuff...
@SvenGeier After 15 years I don't care anymore about the details of the experimental setup (which I can find in my own papers anyway), but my PhD thesis was the occasion to go back and find out (and write explicitly) where all those results and equations I used in my papers came from.
And, typos aside, I think I made a good job of explaining that stuff clearly. So much that when I need an equation from the foundation of my field I find it easier to go for my thesis instead of any textbook.
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