Timeline for How often do people read the work that they cite?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 6, 2012 at 18:08 | comment | added | alvarezpaiva | @Misha: You are right in that it is impossible to understand all proofs, but I think that in many cases we can borrow a nice technique from the "Russian school": one can at least try to understand the proof in some simple, but representative cases and master enough examples to feel that the theorem is "right". | |
| Jun 6, 2012 at 18:05 | comment | added | alvarezpaiva | @Sebastian: Of course the statement is somewhat exagerated, but it is nice to understand things and to explain them correctly after one has understood them. There is to me a marked difference between a paper where an author tries to communicate something (s)he understood and a paper where someone is trying to plant a flag and tell the rest of the world "this is MY theorem". That said, I love to read and digest ideas, so I agree somewhat with Thom not because of moral reasons, but because it brings me pleasure to read a good paper and to make contact with another mind. | |
| Jun 6, 2012 at 17:28 | comment | added | Niemi | It was Wiles (of course), sorry about that. At least I got Fermat right. | |
| Jun 6, 2012 at 12:41 | comment | added | Misha | It all depends on the meaning "results that he/she did not understand": Taken literally, this just means "results whose statement (s)he does not understand", which is a perfectly reasonable viewpoint (although, personally, I would not call it "immoral", just "wrong"). If you add the word "proof" in this maxim, then, I would argue that such sentiment was still quite reasonable 50 years ago, when one could understand pretty much any proof from any area of mathematics after spending few months on them. Things changed since then (classification of finite simple groups is another good example). | |
| Jun 6, 2012 at 9:51 | comment | added | Niemi | I think that this statement is far too general to be universially true. For instance, would it be immoral to use Fermat's last theorem in order to prove something just because you do not understand what Weyl was doing in order to prove it? I think that using a result that is accepted to be true by basically everybody is no immoral. In fact, it would be immoral to not publish a great result just because you need a result for it that you do not fully understand. | |
| Jun 6, 2012 at 9:15 | history | answered | alvarezpaiva | CC BY-SA 3.0 |