Recommendations

This webpage contains advice for people asking for a letter of recommendation from me or someone like me. It was largely plagiarized from a similar page by Ravi Vakil. (Last modified Wednesday, 12-Jun-2024 08:32:44 CDT.)

Special warning (may not apply to others like me): given that I have limited time to write these letters, I would prefer to prioritize supporting the careers of deserving younger mathematicians. As a consequence, I am no longer accepting requests for recommendation letters for promotions beyond the tenured Associate Professor level (or equivalent). In the typical case where such a request is issued by an evaluation committee rather than a candidate, it will be met with a polite one-paragraph reply summarizing my opinion.

You likely have a lot of things on your mind right now, and this is the last thing you want to worry about, but this deals with a central part of your application.

Recommendation letters play an important role for mathematicians at all career stages. For this reason, I am asked to write many letters each year at numerous levels (undergraduates applying for REUs, graduate school, summer employment, etc.; graduate students applying for conference funding, summer programs, postdocs, other jobs, etc.; postdocs applying for tenure-track jobs; tenure cases; fellowships; special research programs). This ends up being a huge time sink (and I will not use an LLM to speed this up), which makes the following request all the more important: Please remember that it is in your interest to make your busy letter writer's job as easy as possible.

Please give me as much notice as possible so I can write a letter which is detailed enough to be useful detail. A month is reasonable. Two weeks may be pushing it if there isn't much flexibility in my schedule at that time. If you give me very little notice, at best I will have to write a rushed and perfunctory letter; at worst I won't have time to write at all (or possibly even to answer your request).

You want to help your recommender write as detailed a letter as possible. Here are things that would help me. Only some may apply to you (especially if I have written for you before). I will likely only start writing your letter once I have all the information I would like (as there is always someone else's letter I can write first). All materials should be provided electronically (no paper please!); for things posted online, a URL will suffice.

Thank you for helping make this process run smoothly, and good luck with your applications!