As a young person growing up in India, enrolled in engineering in a small desolate city, when I wanted to be a mathematician, with no real path in sight, this blog post is actually what I followed, and learnt everything that is mandatory on this blog post during my undergraduate on my own, and then applied for entrance examinations for grad institutes in India, and now have successfully finished my PhD nicely in US.

So, in that sense, this blog post is for people like me, who had no exposure to research scientists in around 2012 in the places we are growing up. (I didn't yet have stable internet then, only once an hour every evening). They still have some years before they could actually come in contact with researchers who can give them good problems to work on. and the local universities are horribly out of whack in their skill/desire to teach the students properly.

And so, in the meantime, till you get access to good research problems, you prepare yourself to be ready for the problem when the day finally comes. And this blog post along with another one: https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html was what kept motivating me when I was studying.

The list of books is as important as anything else. To be fair, in 2012, math.stackexchange.com had grown up quite a bit, but I was not aware of it for various reasons.

Very inspiring story, congrats on your journey!