Friday, October 19, 2012

Mathematics Journal gets Sokaled

Over at That's Mathematics, the author reports that his paper of gibberish mathematics was actually accepted by the journal Advances in Pure Mathematics. This gives you some idea of the quality of that journal.

The paper contains such deathless phrases as "By a little-known result of Fibonacci..." and "It is not yet known whether every real, surjective, pairwise regular functor is ultra-standard". The author pairings in the bibliography include Atiyah and Leibniz, and Atiyah and Eudoxus. Very nice work.

8 comments:

D. Swart said...

How do you think this can happen? How can an editor and a reviewer presumably not recognize the gibberish when they see it?

Jeffrey Shallit said...

It might happen because the journal is more interested in making money through open access fees than in the quality of the mathematics it contains.

Luke Barnes said...

Mathematics Exposed!

For those of us who have suspected for quite a while that there is something seriously wrong with some parts of modern mathematics, this is some small vindication, although perhaps not proof.

:p

Jeffrey Shallit said...

Luke:

I'm sorry you can't differentiate between a journal whose editors are clearly more interested in financial gain than publishing good mathematics, and mainstream philosophical activity.

Joel Reyes Noche said...

I like the cute expressions like $0^8$, $1^7$, $\infty^{-7}$ and $\sqrt{2}1$. But I think the title would have been better if it started with the word "On."

Luke Barnes said...

Missed the reference, eh?

http://recursed.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/religious-philosophy-exposed.html

I don't know enough (or anything) about mathematical or philosophical publishing. I'm just surprised you didn't compare and contrast the two hoaxes.

Danica McKellum said...

"How can an editor and a reviewer presumably not recognize the gibberish when they see it?"

They probably saw that the bibliography included references to the "Zambian Mathematical Society," the "Sudanese Mathematical Journal," the "Liberian Mathematical Journal," and the "Transactions of the Kenyan Mathematical Society," and, trying to be politically correct, wanted to promote these highly esteemed entities.

Jeffrey Shallit said...

No, Luke, of course I recognized my own words and that's why I referred to "mainstream philosophical activity". The cases are quite different. One is an indictment of a new trend in "open access" publishing; the other is an indictment of what regularly goes on.