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On Collaborative Research

24 November 2003

I enjoy a lot doing collaborative research, and I think that my joint papers have greatly improved as a result of my collaborations. Without my coworkers (some of) the results in those papers would have never been found, or would have appeared in a weaker form. I also like thinking that the quality of the presentation has consistently been improved by the intellectual dialogue arising during the process of collaborative work.

During my work, I try to follow the G.H. Hardy-J.E. Littlewood's axioms for successful collaboration. The rules that Hardy and Littlewood adopted for their collaboration were spelled out by Harald Bohr in a lecture which he gave in 1947. They are:

1. When one wrote to the other, it was completely indifferent whether what they wrote was right or wrong.
2. When one received a letter from the other, he was under no obligation to read it, let alone answer it.
3. Although it did not really matter if they both simultaneously thought about the same detail, still it was preferable that they should not do so.
4. It was quite indifferent if one of them had not contributed the least bit to the contents of a paper under their common name.

With the exception of the third axiom, I think that I live by these laws rather closely, and they have worked very well for me. The latest result of their application is the paper CCS with Hennessy's Merge has no Finite Equational Axiomatization with Wan Fokkink, Anna Ingólfsdóttir and Bas Luttik that reports on our solution to one of the problems available from the open problems page associated with the workshop on Process Algebra: Open Problems and Future Directions that I organized with Zoltán Ésik, Wan Fokkink and Anna Ingólfsdóttir.

I look forward to our next collaboration, and I encourage readers of this posting to undertake collaborative work using the four axioms of Hardy and Littlewood.