On requests for career advice

Every so often, I receive a query asking for advice on mathematical career issues, such as
What fields in mathematics should one study?
What mathematical texts should one buy or read?
What problems should one try to solve?
How should one approach mathematical problems?
How should one write mathematical papers?
What universities should one apply to?
What strategies should one pursue to increase ones chances of admission (e.g. to UCLA)?
More generally, how should one succeed in mathematics?
These requests for advice are of course very flattering. Unfortunately, these questions are
too general, and too dependent on ones specific circumstances, interests, options, and
context for me to offer anything other than generic platitudes (see below). Because of this,
and because of lack of available time, I am regretfully unable to meaningfully respond to
any such queries. I would recommend instead consulting with ones high school,
undergraduate or graduate advisor, who is more attuned to your specific situation and will
be able to offer more relevant advice. In particular, I am unable to personally advise
anyone other than UCLA graduate students who have already passed their qualifying
exams.
Regarding mathematics competitions: I have not participated in mathematics competitions
since 1988, and am not familiar with how they work nowadays. For advice on how to solve
mathematical problems, you can try my book on the subject. Also, I should say that while
mathematics competitions are certainly a lot of fun, they are very different activities from
mathematical learning or mathematical research; dont expect the problems you get in,
say, graduate study, to have the same cut-and-dried, neat flavour that an Olympiad
problem does. (While individual steps in the solution might be able to be finished off
quickly by someone with Olympiad training, the majority of the solution is likely to require
instead the much more patient and lengthy process of reading the literature, applying
known techniques, trying model problems or special cases, looking for counterexamples,
and so forth.) So enjoy these competitions, but dont neglect the more boring aspects of
your mathematical education, as those turn out to be ultimately more useful.

Generic platitudes
As I said above, I have no secret formula or other one-size-fits-all prescription for how to
succeed in mathematical research and academia. There are, however, very generic (and
fairly obvious) pieces of advice I can give:
Theres more to mathematics than grades and exams and methods. As an
undergraduate, there is a heavy emphasis on grade averages, and on exams which often
emphasize memorisation of techniques and theory than on actual conceptual
understanding, or on either intellectual or intuitive thought.
However, as you transition to graduate school you will see that there is a higher level of
learning (and more importantly, doing) mathematics, which requires more of your
intellectual faculties than merely the ability to memorise and study, or to copy an existing
argument or worked example. This often necessitates that one discards (or at least
revises) many undergraduate study habits; there is a much greater need for
self-motivated study and experimentation to advance your own understanding, than to
simply focus on artificial benchmarks such as examinations. Also, whereas at the
undergraduate level and below one is mostly taught highly developed and polished
theories of mathematics, which were mostly worked out decades or even centuries ago, at
the graduate level you will begin to see the cutting-edge, "live" stuff - and it may be
significantly different (and more fun) to what you are used to as an undergraduate!
Theres more to mathematics than rigour and proofs. As an undergraduate one is
often first taught mathematics in an informal, intuitive manner (e.g. describing derivatives
and integrals in terms of slopes and areas), but then told a little later that to do things
properly one needs to work and think in a much more precise and formal manner (e.g.
using epsilons and deltas to describe derivatives). It is of course vitally important that you
know how to think rigorously, as this gives you the discipline to avoid many common
errors and purge many misconceptions. Unfortunately, this has the unintended
consequence that fuzzier or intuitive thinking (such as heuristic reasoning, judicious
extrapolation from examples, or analogies with other contexts such as physics) gets
deprecated as non-rigorous. All too often, one ends up discarding ones initial intuition
and is only able to process mathematics at a formal level. The point of rigour is not to
destroy all intuition; instead, it should be used to destroy bad intuition while clarifying and
elevating good intuition. It is only with a combination of both rigorous formalism and good
intuition that one can tackle complex mathematical problems; one needs the former to
correctly deal with the fine details, and the latter to correctly deal with the big picture.
Without one or the other, you will spend a lot of time blundering around in the dark (which

can be instructive, but is highly inefficient). So once you are fully comfortable with rigorous
mathematical thinking, you should revisit your intuitions on the subject and use your new
thinking skills to test and refine these intuitions rather than discard them. The ideal state to
reach is when every heuristic argument naturally suggests its rigorous counterpart, and
vice versa.
Work hard. Relying on intelligence alone to pull things off at the last minute may work for
a while, but generally speaking at the graduate level or higher it doesnt. One needs to do
a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere
serious in mathematics; contrary to public opinion, mathematical breakthroughs are not
powered solely (or even primarily) by Eureka moments of genius, but are in fact largely a
product of hard work, directed of course by experience and intuition. (See also "the cult of
genius".) The devil is often in the details; if you think you understand a piece of
mathematics, you should be able to back that up by having read all the relevant literature
and having written down at least a sketch of how that piece of mathematics goes, and
then ultimately writing up a complete and detailed treatment of the topic. It would be very
pleasant if one could just dream up the grand ideas and let some "lesser mortals" fill in the
details, but, trust me, it doesn't work like that at all in mathematics; past experience has
shown that it is only worth paying one's time and attention to papers in which a substantial
amount of detail and other supporting evidence (or at least a "proof-of-concept") has
already been carefully gathered to support one's "grand idea". If the originator of the idea
is unwilling to do this, chances are that no-one else will do so either.
Enjoy your work. This is in some ways a corollary to the previous; if you dont enjoy what
you are doing, it will be difficult to put in the sustained amounts of energy required to
succeed in the long term. It is much better to work in an area of mathematics which you
enjoy, than one which you are working in simply because it is fashionable (see below).
Dont base career decisions on glamour or fame. Going into a field or department
simply because it is glamorous is not a good idea, nor is focusing on the most famous
problems (or mathematicians) within a field, solely because they are famous honestly,
there isnt that much fame or glamour in mathematics overall, and it is not worth chasing
these things as your primary goal. Anything glamorous is likely to be highly competitive,
and only those with the most solid of backgrounds (in particular, lots of experience with
less glamorous aspects of the field) are likely to get anywhere. A famous unsolved
problem is almost never solved ab nihilo. One has to first spend much time working on
simpler (and much less famous) model problems, acquiring techniques, intuition, partial
results, context, and literature, thus enabling fruitful approaches to the problem and ruling
out fruitless ones, before having any real chance of solving any really big problem in the

area. (Occasionally, one of these problems falls relatively easily, simply because the right
group of people with the right set of tools hadnt had a chance to look at the problem
before, but this is usually not the case for the very intensively studied problems
particularly those which already have a substantial body of no go theorems and
counterexamples which rule out entire strategies of attack.) For similar reasons, one
should never make prizes or recognition a primary reason for pursuing mathematics; it is a
better strategy in the long-term to just produce good mathematics and contribute to your
field, and the prizes and recognition will eventually take care of themselves (and be
well-earned).
Learn and relearn your field. Learning never really stops in this business, even in your
chosen specialty; for instance I am still learning surprising things about basic harmonic
analysis ten years after writing my thesis in the topic. Just because you know a statement
and proof of Fundamental Lemma X, you shouldnt take that lemma for granted can you
find alternate proofs? Do you know why each of the hypotheses are necessary? What
kind of generalizations are known/conjectured/heuristic? Are there weaker and simpler
versions which can suffice for some applications? What are some model examples
demonstrating that lemma in action? When is it a good idea to use the lemma, and when
isnt it? What kind of problems can it solve, and what kind of problems are beyond its
ability to assist with? Are there analogues to that lemma in other areas of mathematics?
Does the lemma fit into a wider paradigm or program? It is particularly useful to lecture on
your field, or write lecture notes or other expository material, even if it is just for your own
personal use. You will eventually be able to internalize even very difficult results using
efficient mental shorthand which not only allows you to use them effortlessly, but also
frees up mental space to learn even more material. (See also "ask yourself dumb
questions".)
Dont be afraid to learn things outside your field. Maths phobia is a pervasive problem
in the wider community. Unfortunately, it sometimes also exists among professional
mathematicians (together with its distant cousin, maths snobbery). If it turns out that in
order to make progress on your problem, you have to learn some external piece of
mathematics, this is a good thing your own mathematical range will increase, and your
work will become more interesting, both to people in your field and also to people in the
external field. If an area of mathematics has a lot of activity in it, it is usually worth learning
why it is so interesting, what kind of problems people try to work on there, and what are
the cool or surprising insights, phenomena, results that that field has generated. (See
also my discussion on what good mathematics is.) That way if you encounter a similar
problem, obstruction, or phenomenon in your own work, you know where to turn for the
resolution.

Learn the limitations of your tools. Mathematical education (and research papers)
tends to focus, naturally enough, on techniques that work. But it is equally important to
know when the tools you have dont work, so that you dont waste time on a strategy
which is doomed from the start, and instead go hunting for new tools to solve the problem
(or hunt for a new problem). Thus, knowing a library of counterexamples, or easily
analysed model situations, is very important, as well as knowing the type of obstructions
that your tool can deal with, and which ones it has no hope of resolving. Also it is worth
knowing under what circumstances your tool of choice can be substituted by other
methods, and what the comparative advantages and disadvantages of each approach is.
If you view one of your favorite tools as some sort of magic wand which mysteriously
solves problems for you, with no other way for you to obtain or comprehend the solution,
this is a sign that you need to understand your tool (and its limitations) much better.
Learn the power of other mathematician's tools. This is a corollary of the previous.
You will find, when listening to talks or reading papers, that there will be problems which
interest you which were solved using an unfamiliar tool, but seem out of reach of your own
personal "bag of tricks". When this happens, you should try to see whether your own tools
can in fact accomplish a similar task, but you should also try to work out what made the
other tool so effective - for instance, to locate the simplest model case in which that tool
does something non-trivial. Once you have a good comparison of the strengths and
weaknesses of the new tool in relation to the old, you will be prepared to recall it whenever
a situation comes up in the future in which the tool would be useful; given enough practice,
you will then be able to add that tool permanently to your repetoire.
Ask yourself dumb questions and answer them! When you learn mathematics,
whether in books or in lectures, you generally only see the end product very polished,
clever and elegant presentations of a mathematical topic. However, the process of
discovering new mathematics is much messier, full of the pursuit of directions which were
na e, fruitless or uninteresting. While it is tempting to just ignore all these failed lines of
inquiry, actually they turn out to be essential to ones deeper understanding of a topic, and
(via the process of elimination) finally zeroing in on the correct way to proceed. So one
should be unafraid to ask stupid questions, challenging conventional wisdom on a
subject; the answers to these questions will occasionally lead to a surprising conclusion,
but more often will simply tell you why the conventional wisdom is there in the first place,
which is well worth knowing. For instance, given a standard lemma in a subject, you can
ask what happens if you delete a hypothesis, or attempt to strengthen the conclusion; if a
simple result is usually proven by method X, you can ask whether it can be proven by
method Y instead; the new proof may be less elegant than the original, or may not work at

all, but in either case it tends to illuminate the relative power of methods X and Y, which
can be useful when the time comes to prove less standard lemmas.
Be sceptical of your own work. If you unexpectedly find a problem solving itself almost
effortlessly, and you cant quite see why, you should try to analyse your solution more
sceptically. In particular, the method may also be able to prove much stronger statements
which are known to be false, which would imply that there is a flaw in the method. In a
related spirit, if you are trying to prove some ambitious claim, you might try to first look for
a counterexample; either you find one, which saves you a lot of time and may well be
publishable in its own right, or else you encounter some obstruction, which should give
some clue as to what one has to do in order to establish the claim positively (in particular,
it can identify the enemy that has to be neutralised in order to conclude the proof).
Actually, its not a bad idea to apply this type of scepticism to other mathematicians
claims also; if nothing else, they can give you a sense of why that claim is true and how
powerful it is.
Think ahead. It is really easy to get bogged down in the details of some work and not
recall the purpose of what one is actually doing; thus it is good to pause every now and
then and recall why one is pursuing a particular goal. For instance, if one is trying to prove
a lemma, ask yourself if the lemma were proven, how would it be used? What features
of the lemma are most important for you? Would a weaker lemma suffice? Is there a
simpler formulation of the lemma? Is it worth trying to omit a hypothesis of the lemma, if
that hypothesis seems hard to obtain in practice? Often, the exact statement of the lemma
is not yet clear before one actually proves it, but you should still be able to get some
partial answers to these questions just from knowing the form of the lemma even if the
details are not yet complete. These questions can help you reformulate your lemma to its
optimal form before sinking too much time into trying to prove it, thus enabling you to use
your research time more efficiently. The same type of principle applies at scales smaller
than lemmas (e.g. when trying to prove a small claim, or to perform a lengthy computation)
and at scales larger than lemmas (e.g. when trying to prove a theorem, solve a research
problem, or pursue a research goal).
Attend talks and conferences, even those not directly related to your work. Modern
mathematics is very much a collaborative activity rather than an individual one. You need
to know whats going on elsewhere in mathematics, and what other mathematicians find
interesting; this will often give valuable perspectives on your own work. You also need to
know whos who, both in your field and in neighboring ones, and to acquaint yourself with
your colleagues. This way you will be much better prepared when it does turn out that
your work has some new connections to other areas of mathematics, or when it becomes

natural to work in collaboration with another mathematician. Yes, it is possible to solve a

major problem after working in isolation for years but only after you first talk to other
mathematicians and learn all the techniques, intuition, and other context necessary to
crack such problems. Oh, and dont expect to understand 100% of any given talk,
especially if it is in a field you are not familiar with; as long as you learn something, the
effort is not wasted, and the next time you go to a talk in that subject you will understand
more. (One can always bring some of your own work to quietly work on once one is no
longer getting much out of the talk.) See also Tom Korner's "How to listen to a maths
lecture".
Study at different places. It is a very good idea to do your graduate study at a different
institution as your undergraduate study, and to take a postdoctoral position at a different
place from where you did your graduate study. Even the best mathematics departments
do not have strengths in every field, so being at several mathematics departments will
broaden your education and expose you to a variety of mathematical cultures.
Furthermore, the act of moving will help you make the (substantial) psychological
transition from an undergraduate student to a graduate student, or from a graduate
student to a postdoctoral researcher.
Talk to your advisor. This is self-evident your advisor knows your situation well and is
the best source of guidance you have. If things get to the point that you are actively
avoiding your advisor (or vice versa), that is a very bad sign. In particular, you should be
aware of your advisor's schedule, and conversely your advisor should be aware of when
you will be available in the department, and what you are currently working on; in
particular, you should give your advisor some advance warning if you want to take a long
period of time away from your studies. If your advisor is unavailable, you should regularly
discuss mathematical issues with at least one other mathematician instead, preferably an
experienced one.
Take the initiative. On the other hand, you shouldnt rely purely on your advisor; if you
feel like you want to learn something, do something, or write something, just go ahead and
do it (though in some cases other priorities, such as writing your thesis, may be
temporarily more important). Research your library or the internet, talk with other graduate
students or faculty, read papers and books on your own, and so forth. (See also ask
yourself dumb questions.)
Be patient. Any given problem generally requires months in order to make satisfactory
progress. While it is possible for routine or unexpectedly easy problems to fall within
weeks, this is the exception rather than the rule. Thus it is not uncommon for months to

pass with no visible progress; however by patiently eliminating fruitless avenues of attack,
you are setting things up so that when the breakthrough does come, one can conclude the
problem in relatively short order. In some cases, you (or the mathematical field in general)
are simply not ready to tackle the problem yet; in this case, setting it aside (but not
forgetting it entirely), building up some skill on other related problems, and returning back
to the original problem in a couple years is often the optimal strategy. Incidentally, most
problems are solved primarily by this sort of patient, thoughtful attack; there are
remarkably few "Eureka!" moments in this business, and don't be discouraged if they don't
magically appear for you (they certainly don't for me).
Be flexible. Mathematical research is by its nature unpredictable if we knew in advance
what the answer would be and how to do it, it wouldnt be research! Thus you will be led in
unexpected directions, and it may end up that you may find a new problem or area of
mathematics more interesting than the one you were initially working in. Thus, while it is
certainly worthwhile to have long-term goals, they should not be set in stone, and should
be updated when new developments occur. One corollary to this is that one should not
base a career decision (such as what university to study at or work in) purely based on a
single faculty member, since it may turn out that this faculty member may move, or that
your interests change, while you are there. Another corollary is that it is generally not a
good idea to announce that you are working on a well-known problem before you have a
feasible plan for solving it, as this can make it harder to gracefully abandon the problem
and refocus your attention in more productive directions in the event that the problem is
more difficult than anticipated. This is also important in grant proposals; saying things like
"I would like to solve <Famous Problem X>" or "I want to develop or use <Famous Theory
Y>" does not impress grant reviewers unless there is a coherent plan (e.g. some easier
unsolved problems to use as milestones) as well as a proven track record of progress.
Be professional in your work. 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. Ones 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. 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.)
Be considerate of your audience. This applies primarily to papers, but also to lectures
and seminars. On the one hand, the most important thing in mathematics is to get results,
and prove them correctly. However, one also needs to make a good faith effort to
communicate these results to their intended audience. Good exposition is hard work
almost as hard as good research, sometimes and one may feel that having proved the
result, one has no further obligation to explain it. However, this type of attitude tends to
needlessly infuriate the very people who would otherwise be the strongest supporters and
developers of your work, and is ultimately counter-productive. Thus, one should devote
serious thought (and effort) to issues such as logical layout of a paper, choice and
placement of notation, and the addition of heuristic, informal, motivational or overview
material in the introduction and in other sections of a paper. Ideally, at every point in the
paper, the reader should know what the immediate goal is, what the long-term goal is,
where various key statements or steps will be justified, why the notation, lemmas, and
other material just introduced will be relevant to these goals, and have a reasonable idea
of the context in which these arguments are placed in. (In short, a good paper should tell
the reader Why and Where and not just How and What.) In practice one tends to fall
far short of such ideals, but there are often still ways one can make ones papers more
accessible without compromising the results. It sometimes helps to sit on a paper for a
while, until the details have faded somewhat from your memory, and then reread it with a
fresher perspective (and one closer to that of your typical audience); this can often
highlight some significant issues with the exposition which can then be easily addressed.
See also my advice on writing and submitting papers.
Don't prematurely obsess on a single "big problem" or "big theory". This is a
particularly dangerous occupational hazard in this subject - that one becomes focused, to
the exclusion of other mathematical activity, on a single really difficult problem in a field (or
on some grand unifying theory) before one is really ready (both in terms of mathematical
preparation, and also in terms of one career) to devote so much of one's research time to
such a project. When one begins to neglect other tasks (such as writing and publishing
one's "lesser" results), hoping to use the eventual "big payoff" of solving a major problem
or establishing a revolutionary new theory to make up for lack of progress in all other

areas of one's career, then this is a strong warning sign that one should rebalance one's
priorities. While it is true that several major problems have been solved, and several
important theories introduced, by precisely such an obsessive approach, this has only
worked out well when the mathematician involved (a) has a proven track record of reliably
producing significant papers in the area already, and (b) has a secure career (e.g. a
tenured position). If you do not yet have both (a) and (b), and if your ideas on how to solve
a big problem still have a significant speculative component (or if your grand theory does
not yet have a definite and striking application), I would strongly advocate a more
balanced approach instead: keep the big problems and theories in mind, and tinker with
them occasionally, but spend most of your time on more feasible "low-hanging fruit",
which will build up your experience, mathematical power, and credibility for when you are
ready to tackle the more ambitious projects.
Talks are not the same as papers. It is difficult to give good talks, especially when one is
just starting out ones career. One should avoid the common error of treating a talk like a
paper, with all the attendant details, technicalities, and formalism. (In particular, one
should never give a talk which consists solely of transparencies of ones research paper!)
Such talks are almost impossible for anyone not intimately familiar with your work to be
able to follow, especially since (unlike when reading a paper) it is difficult for an audience
member to refer back to notation that had been defined, or comments that had been made,
four slides or five blackboards ago. Instead, a talk should complement a paper by
providing a high-level and more informal overview of the same material, especially for the
more standard or routine components of the argument; this allows one to channel more of
the audiences attention onto the most interesting or important components, which can be
described in more detail. A good talk should also be friendly to non-experts by devoting
at least the first few minutes going over basic examples or background, so that they are
not completely lost even from the beginning. Actually, even the experts will appreciate a
review of the background material; even if none of this material is new, sometimes you will
have a new perspective on the old material which is of interest. Also, if you organize your
presentation of background material correctly, your treatment of the new material should
flow more naturally and be more readily appreciated by the audience. One particularly
effective method is to present a proof of New Theorem Y by first reviewing a proof of
Standard Theorem X in the style of the proof of Y, and then later in the lecture, when the
time comes to prove Y, just note that one simply repeats all the steps used to prove X with
only a few key changes, which one then highlights. (Of course, it would be a good idea to
keep the proof of X on the blackboard or on screen during all of this, if possible.) This
often works better, and can even be a little bit faster, than if one skipped the proof of X to
save time and started directly on the proof of Y.

Use the wastebasket. Not every idea leads to a success, and not every first draft forms a
good template for the final draft. This is true even for the very best mathematicians. There
are times when a project just isnt working the way it was initially planned, and you have to
scale it down, refocus it, or shelve it altogether; or a lemma that you spent a lot of time on
turns out not to add anything much to the paper and has to be reluctantly jettisoned or
deferred to another paper; or that the structure of a half-written paper is clearly not optimal
and that one needs to rewrite the entire thing from scratch. (Indeed, some of the papers I
am most proud of are virtually unrecognizable from their first draft, due to one or more
complete rewrites.) One has to know when one should be persistent and patient, and
when one should be pragmatic and realistic; stubbornly working away at a dead end is not
the most efficient use of your time, and publishing every last scrap of your work is not
always the best way to meet the standards of quality you expect from your publications. Of
course, in todays digital age it is cheap and easy to backup all your work, and you should
of course do this before performing major surgery on any paper. Even an embarrassingly
wrong piece of work (and I have a number of these, which fortunately have never made it
as far as publication) should be stored somewhere, because you never know whether
something salvageable can be extracted from it, and also it is good to make a note of
mistakes that one should avoid in the future.
Write down what you've done. There were many occasions early in my career when I
read, heard about, or stumbled upon some neat mathematical trick or argument, and
thought I understood it well enough that I didn't need to write it down; and then, say six
months later, when I actually needed to recall that trick, I couldn't reconstruct it at all.
Eventually I resolved to write down (preferably on a computer) a sketch of any interesting
argument I came across - not necessarily at a publication level of quality, but detailed
enough that I could then safely forget about the details, and readily recover the argument
from the sketch whenever the need arises. I recommend that you do this also, as it serves
several useful purposes beyond the obvious one of having the argument permanently
available to you in the future. Firstly, it gives you practice in mathematical writing, both at
the technical level (e.g. in learning how to use TeX) and at an expository or pedagogical
level. Secondly, it tests whether you have really understood the argument on more than
just a superficial level. Thirdly, it frees up mental space; you no longer have to remember
the exact details of the argument, and so can devote your memory to learning newer
topics. Finally, your writeup may also eventually be helpful in your later research papers,
lecture notes, or a research proposals.
Make your work available. With the advent of the internet and world-wide web, and in
particular with preprint servers such as the arXiv, there is really no excuse not to make
your preprints available online, so that anyone who is interested in your work can easily

find it. (Most journals now also have online availability, but given that the gap between
preprint release and publication is measured in years, it still makes sense to have the
preprint online too.)

In particular, your work will show up in search engine queries in your

topic (I have come across many an interesting paper this way). This will help spread
awareness of you and your work among your colleagues, and hopefully lead to future
collaborations, or other people building upon (and citing) your papers. One might be
worried that by making your work available, you are inviting too much competition into
your area, but if the area you work in is of that much interest to others, the competition will
come anyway, and this way you will at least have priority (note that submissions to servers
such as the arXiv have reliable timestamps) and be acknowledged in citations. Of course,
one should still ensure that your preprints are written to publication-quality standard if at
all possible, although this is not as important as it is with published papers since it is
relatively easy to replace preprints with updated versions. As to whether you should email
your preprints to other experts in the field, I would only do this if the preprint is
unquestionably of direct interest to that person (e.g. it solves a conjecture that they
formulated). Otherwise there is the awkward possibility that the person you send the
preprint to is too busy (or no longer interested in the topic) to read your work in detail, or
that you might accidentally be perceived as being pushy, egotistic, or arrogant. In most
cases it suffices to just make your work on-line; awareness of your work will spread by
itself via several channels (e.g. the refereeing process, conferences, word-of-mouth,
preprint mailing lists) and there is usually little additional gain in trying to actively push the
paper.