Be professional in your work

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
(Samuel Johnson, “Rasselas”)

Take your duties and responsibilities seriously; being frivolous is fine with friends, but can be annoying for your colleagues, especially those who are busy with similar responsibilities.

Exercise professional courtesy and respect for the time and efforts of your colleagues. Unless you are already on good casual terms with the person you are interacting with, send them an email (or text, if you are close enough to share phone numbers) to schedule a call or meeting rather than just showing up or calling unannounced. If you have an appointment, be on time; being too late or too early can disrupt your colleague’s other plans for the day and can also be viewed as a sign of disrespect.

Be presentable in appearance; there is usually no need to adhere to formal business attire, but one should not be excessively unkempt or ungroomed either, as this can distract other participants from the topic at hand, and also send the undesirable signal that you are not willing to invest more than a minimal amount of your own time in making preparations for the meeting.

Other examples of distracting and/or disrespectful activities to avoid in a work meeting include:

• Eating
• Drinking
• Taking unrelated phone calls
• Playing music

Unless such activities are explicitly or implicitly permitted as part of the planned event. If such distractions are unavoidable, make efforts to minimize their impact on other participants, for instance by leaving the meeting room (or turning off audio and video, for a remote meeting).

One’s writing should also be taken seriously; your work is going to appear in permanently available journals, and what may seem witty or clever today may be incredibly embarrassing for you a decade from now.

Being assertive is fine, but being overly self-promoting or competitive is generally counterproductive; if your work is good, it should speak for itself, and it is better to spend your energies on creating new mathematics than trying to fight over your old mathematics.

Try not to take any research setbacks (such as a rejection of a paper, or discovery of an error) personally; there are usually constructive resolutions to these issues that will ensure that you become a better mathematician and avoid these problems in the future.

Be generous with assigning credit, acknowledgements and precedence in your own writing (but make sure it is assigned correctly!). The tone of the writing should be neutral and professional; personal opinions (e.g. as to the importance of a subject, a paper, or an author) should be rarely voiced, and clearly marked as opinion when they are. In short, you should write professionally. (See also my advice on writing papers.)

On your web page, keep the personal separated from the professional; your colleagues are visiting your web page to get your papers, preprints, contact info, and curriculum vitae, and are probably not interested in your hobbies or opinions. (Conversely, your friends are probably not interested in your research papers.)