Timeline for Mathematicians whose works were criticized by contemporaries but became widely accepted later
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 2, 2013 at 20:22 | comment | added | Joël | My last sentence? I just meant that everyone in his career has had (or will have) a good paper rejected, and often more than once. This is not enough, by far, to make you a "rejected mathematician". | |
| Mar 2, 2013 at 20:19 | comment | added | Joël | What I meant when I wrote "this is not mathematics" was that, as far as we are concerned about how the mathematical community can eventually accept a work that it criticized and rejected at first, this is not an example as the scientific community which was concerned was the economics and finance community. Being not a probabilist, I don't know well how the community of probability reacted to this work (and I would be happy to learn it), but in any case they were note the intended audience. | |
| Mar 2, 2013 at 20:14 | comment | added | Joël | Hans: on this I agree. The formula and its proof is beautiful. I remember when I first learn it saying to myself: this can't be true. This formula can not follow from this set of hypothesis. There must be a mistake or a hidden assumption somewhere in the proof. And I read it, several times, and at the end I understood. That's a mathematical proof as its best. one which does everything: explaining why the result is true and at the same time forbidding any doubt about its truth (as a mathematical result I mean -- the question of its applicability in real world is an other matter). | |
| Mar 2, 2013 at 19:15 | comment | added | Hans | @Joel: I still think the Black--Scholes formula has this mathematical flavour with fine and difficult probability theory. Your last sentence: ??? | |
| Mar 2, 2013 at 18:52 | comment | added | Joël | and nowadays it is only's Merton's proof which is taught anymore. Merton, which heard of Black and Scholes's work, helped them having it published and waited this was done to publish his version: a great example of honesty. Finally, in less than three years both papers were published, and a few years after, their equation was used in financial markets and taught in all mathematical finance classes. To conclude, if everyone who got a paper rejected one or two time could be on this list, we would all be there. | |
| Mar 2, 2013 at 18:49 | comment | added | Joël | economist, but it was the great Marvin Minsky. So they were all three the exact opposite of the forgotten scents working in obscurity. Now what happen specifically with Black and Scholes equation was that their proof of it was unnecessarily complicated, and with a lot of very disputable hypotheses (it was based on Fama's modeling on Financial market, which are in many respects difficult to believe). For this reason, they had some difficulties publishing it. At about the same time, Merton found independently a much cleaner, simpler, beautiful proof with less hypothesis (still disputable)... | |
| Mar 2, 2013 at 18:44 | comment | added | Joël | Like with most other answers, I profoundly disagree with this one. For one thing, this is is not mathematics, but let us forget about this. Black, Scholes, and Merton were three young bright very well integrated student, graduate from the best university in their field (Chicago, MIT, Harvard). The Advisor of Merton was Paul Samuelson then and now considered by many the greatest economists of his generation. Scholes' advisor was Eugene Fama, one of the founding father of modern finance (and by the way a student and nemesis of our own Mandelbrot). To be sure, Black's adviser was not an... | |
| Mar 2, 2013 at 18:12 | history | answered | Hans | CC BY-SA 3.0 |