Timeline for Obsessive editing/revising of math papers
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 16, 2019 at 15:02 | history | edited | Denis Serre | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
deleted 6 characters in body
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| Oct 1, 2018 at 5:00 | comment | added | Jacob Manaker | @SofieVerbeek: If you don't have good motivation for a theorem, then why are you proving it? Thurston does a good job of explaining it: one does not "advance mathematics" by proving theorems; one advances mathematics by creating documents that are interesting to read. | |
| Sep 29, 2018 at 14:17 | comment | added | Kimball | While I agree with the advice in this answer, I am not sure it applies to the OP's question, which I understand to be about how much time spend on minor edits after a draft is already written. But this answer seems mostly about things you should keep in mind while writing the original draft. | |
| Sep 28, 2018 at 12:41 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Todd Trimble | ||
| Sep 28, 2018 at 12:36 | comment | added | Ricky | @Piotr Hajlasz If there is not a big difference between $n$ and $n \cdot 1.3$ then by induction... just joking of course, but I really think that there is some sort of pressure in publishing short paper... but I completely agree that it would be great to have better explanation, especially of the main ideas, rather then more detailed computations. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 22:52 | comment | added | Piotr Hajlasz | @darijgrinberg Sure, I exaggerated a bit, but this is how I feel, when I am frustrated reading a paper that is written not carefully. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 22:47 | comment | added | darij grinberg | @SofieVerbeek: "extremely rude and unprofessional" is indeed an overstatement (and what does "unprofessional" mean anyway if a majority of professionals are behaving this way?), but I agree with the gist of Piotr's post. Particularly the unspecific references to textbooks for proofs of "folklore" results are a cancer, and it would usually take the author just an extra 30 minutes (per paper) to complete them (unless the author is bluffing and does not actually have a reference). | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 21:02 | comment | added | Piotr Hajlasz | @Ricky I disagree. If a concise paper would have $n$ pages, submitting a paper on $n\cdot 1.3$ pages will never be regarded as too long unless you decide to submit a paper to a journal that strictly restricts the number of pages. There are many good journals that accept longer paper. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 20:50 | comment | added | Ricky | I also add that usually good journals prefer short papers (or at least papers that are not too long), so one is more or less forced the write shorter, and more difficult to follow, proofs. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 20:02 | comment | added | Sofie Verbeek | I'm not an expert but I'm going to try and play Devil's advocate regardless. You ascribe these first points to "extreme" rudeness and unprofessionality, but ask yourself, what do you see as your goal as a mathematician? Presumably it'll be something akin to "to advance mathematics", like most mathematicians. With this in mind, maybe the proofs are sketchy because the writers find it just hard; maybe they reference to [5] rather than to [5,Thm. 6.41] because they forgot; maybe they do not provide appropriate motivation because they don't know yet what things will be good for. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 19:43 | history | answered | Piotr Hajlasz | CC BY-SA 4.0 |