Comments on: Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 08:30:31 +0000

Isn’t it narrow-minded and constrictive to say that any proposal that is not presented in TeX is not worthy of consideration? … To judge every thought by whether it is presented in TeX is stifling.

Nobody’s saying the use of TeX is a fully reliable test for whether a paper is good, but here’s an analogy:

Suppose someone handwrites a paper in crayon. Logically, this tells us nothing about the content of the paper, but in practice, it tells us a lot about the author. Very few people who write in crayon have anything interesting or worthwhile to say. It’s not a logical guarantee, but if you see a research paper written in crayon, it’s perfectly reasonable not to take it seriously (since it almost certainly isn’t serious).

Not using TeX in a math/CS paper is not nearly as extreme as writing in crayon, but it is similar in spirit. There are a handful of older or eccentric researchers who have never learned TeX. Other than that, anybody in math or theoretical CS who doesn’t use TeX looks like a rube. This may not be fair, but it’s a true statement about appearances within the community.

By: asdf

asdf — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 01:59:37 +0000

What can I say; if a paper is full of spelling errors, that doesn’t necessarily mean the mathematical content is wrong, but it’s not a good sign. TeX is part of mathematical culture and using anything else might be similar to using an unconventional notation for a familiar math concept. Again, not conclusive, but not a good sign. Nothing short of actually reading a paper (or at least reading enough to find a definite error) is enough to form a conclusive judgement of its content. But lots of things, like the presence or absence of spelling errors and weird notation and typography, can raise or lower expectations at the outset. That I think is what Scott was trying to get at.

By: Craig

Craig — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 18:18:04 +0000

asdf – To date, I’m using remarkably few equations. If I were using more, TeX-ware would be of greater value to me, but as it is, it seems to be one more thing to install and learn. Doing so just to placate people who think everyone should do things the same way rubs me the wrong way.

Apart from facilitating the typesetting of equations, are there compelling reasons for someone to use TeX who will not be submitting papers to journals?

By: asdf

asdf — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:54:51 +0000

Re provability in PA: the graph minor theorem demonstrably is not provable in PA, though it’s provable in second order arithmetic (probably in some weak fragment). It certainly sounds plausible to me that P vs NP is independent of PA but can be solved in PA2. Set theory (ZFC) is something else again, and it would be awful if solving P vs NP needed it.

Craig, it wouldn’t occur to me to use a word processor to format a math paper, because of how messy it would be to enter the equations. With TeX you type them pretty much the way you would read them out loud.

By: Craig

Craig — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 08:17:38 +0000

I left academe 13 years ago and have been doing research quietly and steadily while earning a living by other means. Most of my work involves the development of algorithms for challenging problems, especially problems in graph theory. My working set of problems includes Graph Isomorphism, Subgraph Isomorphism, Maximal Cliques, Maximum Cliques, k-Clique Existence, and Factoring.

I’m partially shifting into a writing mode so that I can get a lot of work out of my head, software, and notes and into the world. In particular, I have several new algorithms for Graph Isomorpism, Maximal Cliques, Maximum Cliques, and k-Clique Existence that are ready to share.

I have published none of my work beyond my dissertation, so we’re talking about 20 years of research that I need to organize and write up. I believe that some of my work will be of interest. I have no interest in publishing in journals. I plan on posting papers on ArXiv or the ACM equivalent.

I haven’t been planning on making source code available – a lot of work would be required to prepare it and maintain it that I think could be better spent. I haven’t ruled this out, though.

Call me unconventional or attribute it to a personality quirk. I’m hoping that my work will be taken seriously but I’m not overly concerned that it might set off an occasional alarm on first exposure.

I hadn’t thought seriously about learning TeX or how to use TeX-related tools until reading this blog entry. I’ve been planning on posting in PDF to an archive. I have very little need for the typesetting capabilities that TeX offers. I’m inclined to skipping TeX and using a conventional word-processor to generate PDF.

Comments and suggestions on my situation and plans are most welcome.

By: Navajo mathematician

Navajo mathematician — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:26:56 +0000

Senge Tame!
1.
This affair explains why mathematicians need to learn
some basics of complexity: proving that some thing
is “hard” gives semi-rigorous, conditional
proof of impossibility of “simple” descriptions of the thing.
In other words, it provides implicit counter-examples.
And this strategy is very kosher when indecidability is used.
2. The “mathematical” situation here is very common:
Given a set X, with “easy” membership for its convex hull
CO(X). Is the membership for the convex
hull CO(X \otimes X) “easy”?
Quite often the answer is negative. The good example
for this “quantum” blog is the separability/entanglement
problem. I wonder if there exists some general
statement of the sort?

By: D'Aundray Bullock

D'Aundray Bullock — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 02:42:20 +0000

Isn’t it narrow-minded and constrictive to say that any proposal that is not presented in TeX is not worthy of consideration? If new ideas were judged by their adherence to conventional or restricted form, then men such as Grassmann, Frege, and Feynman would have been ignored, to our detriment. A creative idea can be as well presented in Baskerville or Times New Roman as in TeX. It is the content of the idea that is important, not the form. To judge every thought by whether it is presented in TeX is stifling.

By: AuggieDoggie

AuggieDoggie — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:48:38 +0000

Friedland has posted a 3rd version that better incorporates the feedback of Babai & other researchers @

http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0398

By: Job

Job — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:51:36 +0000

Which problem do you think resembles GI the most: Primality Testing or Factoring? Why?

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:33:34 +0000

I asked Laci Babai about the canonical form question. He wrote that

1. Job’s “graph hash” is called “complete invariant” in the literature.
2. complete invariants in P imply canonical forms in P, so my “ugly world” is ruled out. The elementary two-page proof is in:

http://research.microsoft.com/~gurevich/Opera/131.pdf

3. GI in P is not known to imply complete invariants in P.