write-body-of-work-summary

a skill to take one mathematician's papers, and write an overview of their research program.

a Claude Code skill. give it one mathematician’s papers and it reads them all and writes an overview of their research program: a two-to-three page essay on the program, then a short paragraph on each paper.

where write-paper-guide companions one paper and write-topic-guide explains one idea across sources, this covers one person’s work, organized by the themes running through it.

it borrows the pre-summarization phase intact: each paper is distilled by a dedicated subagent, in its own context, into a digest under source-notes/, and the summary is written from those notes. in place of a concept spine it gathers a themes map — the threads running through the corpus, every paper mapped onto them, and a decision about the throughline and how the paper paragraphs are organized. the themes map gates the writing: no drafting until the threads and the throughline are agreed.

it is a summary, not a contribution and not a survey of the field.

invoke

/write-body-of-work-summary my research program, papers in ~/papers/
/write-body-of-work-summary summarize X's body of work for a tenure committee

produces

a guide directory in the house format, with source-notes/ and a themes-by-papers table kept alongside.