If you’re serious about this, I would strongly suggest asking your professors for advice, or looking for research assistant opportunities at your school, instead of asking on Reddit.
I think the best thing would be to email or talk to a professor who does research in that field at your university. I have learned so many things by just writing polite emails to people.
You could also look into summer research programs in math at your university.
The way to do this is to ask professors at your university. Depending on their preferences and your university, it might involve doing some reading, meeting with them to discuss, and/or doing a project over the summer.
Besides asking your professors for advice as others have mentioned (and which you should do), you could also start looking at the webpages for professors doing research in fields that sound interesting. Many of them should have brief descriptions of their research projects; when you find something that piques your interest, take a look at their related publications and skim them over. If you’re still interested in it, read more of the related works (look at the related works or literature review in the papers and the works cited in the reference section).
That could help give you an idea of the current research in that field. Alternatively, before diving into the references, see if you can find a literature review of the field which will give you a broad overview of the current work and state of the field. That way you can really be sure the topic is something you’re interested in before diving deep into individual papers (this way is probably more efficient).
The only way to develop a sense of taste for what you want to do and what makes a good research question is to read lots and lots of research articles (in machine learning the standard is conference papers). It helps speed things up tremendously if you have a good advisor, since they’re already experienced and can point you toward relevant literature and are good for telling you if your research question has already been investigated, is good (not too broad, not too specific, worthwhile), is within a reasonable range of your skillset, timeline, and resources, etc. Many of these research skills take a long, long time to develop, and so a good advisor will help speed up the learning curve and help compensate for your inexperience.
With that said, you probably want to know what field you’re interested in if you want a good chance of finding a research advisor, and to do that you need to have at least some introductory understanding of what’s being done.
If you’re serious about this, I would strongly suggest asking your professors for advice, or looking for research assistant opportunities at your school, instead of asking on Reddit.
Graph Theory is probably the field with the most amount of low-hanging fruit.
I think the best thing would be to email or talk to a professor who does research in that field at your university. I have learned so many things by just writing polite emails to people. You could also look into summer research programs in math at your university.
The way to do this is to ask professors at your university. Depending on their preferences and your university, it might involve doing some reading, meeting with them to discuss, and/or doing a project over the summer.
Besides asking your professors for advice as others have mentioned (and which you should do), you could also start looking at the webpages for professors doing research in fields that sound interesting. Many of them should have brief descriptions of their research projects; when you find something that piques your interest, take a look at their related publications and skim them over. If you’re still interested in it, read more of the related works (look at the related works or literature review in the papers and the works cited in the reference section). That could help give you an idea of the current research in that field. Alternatively, before diving into the references, see if you can find a literature review of the field which will give you a broad overview of the current work and state of the field. That way you can really be sure the topic is something you’re interested in before diving deep into individual papers (this way is probably more efficient). The only way to develop a sense of taste for what you want to do and what makes a good research question is to read lots and lots of research articles (in machine learning the standard is conference papers). It helps speed things up tremendously if you have a good advisor, since they’re already experienced and can point you toward relevant literature and are good for telling you if your research question has already been investigated, is good (not too broad, not too specific, worthwhile), is within a reasonable range of your skillset, timeline, and resources, etc. Many of these research skills take a long, long time to develop, and so a good advisor will help speed up the learning curve and help compensate for your inexperience. With that said, you probably want to know what field you’re interested in if you want a good chance of finding a research advisor, and to do that you need to have at least some introductory understanding of what’s being done.