Research Quadrant
Published on 13.05.2025

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Today was a busy day for me, I did some research on python internals (maybe for tomorrow's post, need more research), but had to chill with the family. Either way, here's a quick one.

I came across this concept of Pasteur's quadrant.

+-----------------+-----------------+
|  Niels Bohr     |  Louis Pasteur  |
|  Pure research  |  Use-inspired   |
+-----------------+-----------------+
|  Tinkerer       |  Thomas Edison  |
|  Hacking        |  Applied focus  |
+-----------------+-----------------+

Axes:
↑ Quest for fundamental understanding
Consideration of use →

This is just a classification of research kinds. Which one are you? I personally like to think I'm more of a Pasteur kinda guy, but if I'm being honest I've been to all the quadrants, many times. I think I still do it all.

Pure Research
Turing machine defined the limits of computation, laying the foundation for modern computing.

Use-Inspired Research
Google's drive to organise the web produced the PageRank Algorithm.

Practical Tinkering
YouTube started as a side project after creators struggled to share some clips from a dinner party.

Applied Driven
Nobody expected the emergent behaviour of transformers when scaled, but OpenAI made a bet.

You might be everything, you might be one thing, doesn't matter at all. This classification is just a construct, created to help us make some sense of the chaos that is productive work. In reality, most awesome projects are often ignorant to this meta, and are driven instead by curiosity, necessity, or just some itch to understand or create.

Don't worry too much about where you fit - just have a driving factor, stay curious and keep building.

Have any thoughts? - @pwnfunction.