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As he was brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of geometry, probability theory, and statistics that had eluded top experts for decades.
Known as the Gaussian correlation inequality (GCI), the conjecture originated in the 1950s, was posed in its most elegant form in 1972 and has held mathematicians in its thrall ever since. "I know of people who worked on it for 40 years," said Donald Richards, a statistician at Pennsylvania State University. "I myself worked on it for 30 years."
[...] No one is quite sure how, in the 21st century, news of Royen's proof managed to travel so slowly. "It was clearly a lack of communication in an age where it's very easy to communicate," [Bo'az] Klartag said.
"But anyway, at least we found it," he added—and "it's beautiful."
[...] The "feeling of deep joy and gratitude" that comes from finding an important proof has been reward enough. "It is like a kind of grace," he said. "We can work for a long time on a problem and suddenly an angel—[which] stands here poetically for the mysteries of our neurons—brings a good idea."
Source: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/elusive-math-proof-found-almost-lost
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday August 07 2018, @10:21AM (35 children)
You mean he managed to get out of rat race? As a statistician? How is he going to afford health care?
That's not possible, this is a story from an alternative Universe, surely the nowadays corporations managed to solve the problem of wage slaves evading the system while there is still some juice in them to squeeze.
Oops, he's German. Fucking social-democracy, free education and cheap socialised medicine! Fucking thieves!!!
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday August 07 2018, @10:55AM (17 children)
and there was no university to claim credit or pimp it. Hence "unknown", in case *another* Uni. got the press...
Thank's for posting the ArX link , the wired piece was a bit *too* fluffy for my delicate morning senses....
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:27AM (8 children)
I didn't and TFS doesn't contain one.
But for your delicate Tuesday morning (Tuesday's gray ... and Wednesday too), here it is [arxiv.org]
Picked from the quantamagazine, which originally published [quantamagazine.org] the story (still fluffy).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:47AM (1 child)
there was a "Paper" link, that pleasantly, contain a reference to the text.
Many links, do not....;-/
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 07 2018, @12:04PM
Ah, yes, now that you hinted what to look for, I see it.
Alone on its line, carefully squeezed between the fluffy content on top and the bottom line of the border surrounding TFS. For a better effect, I would suggest the editor to enclose the link between <sub></sub> tags, it will make it less evident.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @12:12PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:33PM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @10:19PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:23PM (2 children)
Please link to the abstract page for arXiv papers. Getting from the abstract to the paper is trivial. Getting from the paper to the abstract is a PITA.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:30PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:43PM
Ok.
For the occasions it accidentally does not happen, seems that the PITA is manually replacing 3 letters and deleting other 4. Like in:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.1028.pdf
to
https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.1028
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:29PM (7 children)
Actually, TFA explains in more detail why it attracted little notice. First, there are a few other known incorrect "proofs" of this specific conjecture that have circulated in the past few years. But more importantly, the guy chose to publish it in an obscure Asian journal that he had been asked to be on the editorial board of the previous year.
A major finding like this would generally merit publication in a major journal. Even academics who happened upon the published article would likely be suspicious of a journal if they didn't know of it or its peer-review standards (since a lot of obscure journals are pretty lax), and they'd be doubly suspicious of the fact that the author was himself on the editorial board (which, at some journals that publish just about anything, could be evidence that an editor just wanted to self-promote).
For everyone here who says "What function to do journals serve these days?" when an article about them comes up, here's a shining example of why we need GOOD established journals. There's way too much crap posted to free online repositories, so the signal-to-noise ratio is problematic. Scholarly communication thus depends on some sort of sorting apparatus, particularly when the source of a significant find isn't well-known (as in this case). Had this guy published in a leading journal it no doubt would have been accepted and immediately disseminated. Why did he choose the more obscure one? Maybe he thought it might help the reputation of the journal he had asked to be on the board of to have a significant paper like this? That is partly how one builds journal reputation over time... but if that were the case, why didn't he try harder to disseminate it himself to people "in the know" who would spread the info? Maybe he just didn't care much and wanted a quick and easy way to publish.
----
P.S. Also, on a separate note, shouldn't the title of this be "Wired posts an interesting math story and nobody notices"? TFA is from over a year ago. It took me a few minutes because I feel like I read this before... and I think I did. I think I've said this before, but I'll repeat: I have no problem publishing older stories that may be of interest here, but can we at least flag them somehow if the article is more than a month or two old (or whatever timeline makes sense)?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:13PM (5 children)
This always was, even when the internet was "implemented" on parchment by cursives encoding. using monks as tty operators.
And will always be.
My point: "GOOD established journals" as a solution to the problem may be as utopic as... pick whatever utopia you fancy.
On the long run, the failure is inevitable - "GOOD established journals" will mean "power" in academia and, as always, power corrupts.
You either accept :
- wider access and chances of noise; *or*
- good signal to noise and increased chances of sounds ideas/good papers going rejected.
I leaning towards the first: I see the ease of filtering noise (by GOOD established journals) as just a matter of personal convenience for the players. Tough luck, if you wanna play the game, well, deal with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:43PM (4 children)
Why can't you have both?
I in no way was arguing against the existence of free online repositories for whatever random people want to post. However, they don't function as a filter at all.
There will always be problems with journals too. But there's a better chance of major findings being noticed if there's a standard pipeline for dissemination that also holds to standards.
Do you know the outcome if you don't have such things? It's actually worse than without blind-review journals in terms of your concerns about concentrating power. Because a blind-review journal can allow an unknown author a chance to get published on the merit of the research and thereby get noticed by those "in power."
You don't have that, and guess what mainstream researchers fall back on to do the sorting? They ask colleagues they know and depend on them to tell them about good papers. So it reverts to an "old boys network" model, rather than one that allows an unknown researcher to get noticed through blind review.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:05AM (3 children)
Both are needed and possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 08 2018, @02:24AM (2 children)
Huh. And here I thought the "either" and the big highlighted *OR* in your previous post meant something.
So what was the point of your post again, since I never advanced an argument saying open repositories shouldn't exist?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 08 2018, @02:31AM (1 child)
Apologies. Posted that one in the middle of the night just as I was falling asleep.
My position: if a black-n-white answer is required, I prefer the "open repositories with chances of noise" over "total access control and vetting with risks of good ideas falling between the cracks". Any "grey shade" solution is preferable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:19PM
Ah, okay. No need to apologize, and basically I agree that leaning toward open publication and open access is better. I was just a little confused at the seemingly conflicting posts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:58PM
This author deserves a little more generosity of spirit. Maybe he wants to spend his time focusing on mathematical beauty, rather than pesky reviewer comments. He is retired and maybe wants to publish in a place where he can easily read the other papers (which he can probably do as editor). Not a bad attitude. In this day and age, most journals seem less and less reasonable. They make the authors transfer the paper copyright (i.e. give away the work), and charge outrageous fees to publish and read papers. By publishing in an obscure journal, he has taken away from the big journals, which act as rent-seeking gatekeepers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @12:08PM (15 children)
As a statistician, he probably never was in the rat race in the first place.
What is "health care"? We're all gonna die and health care doesn't change that much. I mean it'd be one thing if health care changed your life expectancy at age 65 (traditional retirement age for much of the world) from say 75 years to 1000 years, for example. But rather it's changing one's life span (if you're male) from 75 years to 80 or 85 years [oecd.org] (most of the low lying fruit not being relevant to a person at retirement age). Not very interesting at present for the money spent.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 07 2018, @12:41PM (1 child)
Dear asshole khallow,
The low value you place on life serves to indicate that your life is worthless.
Kill yourself now.
Sincerely,
Everyone
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:54PM
Life extension by costly and often painful, horrific means is not life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:03PM (8 children)
Such a profound question. And the form you put it, almost Watsonian.
While you ponder in the nooks and crannies of the solution configuration space of the theoretical problem, let us note that the "health care industry" is ruthlessly pragmatic in chasing profit as the first priority [oecd.org] in a certain country and lets the outcome in terms of life expectancy [oecd.org] as a secondary priority.
But yeah that's not very interesting; even this FA clearly demonstrates that, on average, retired people are no longer contributing to the humanity progress. I mean you can discard Thomas Royen as an outlier, the results of the statistics aren't going to show much of a difference.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:44PM (7 children)
What's new about that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:47PM (6 children)
You still don't get it?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:51PM (5 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:49PM (4 children)
Throw away your statistics and start looking at people as people, not as cogs in your twisted idea of economy. You may become a better human for it.
I'll understand if you don't get it or don't want to, it won't come as a surprise.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @10:17PM
That would be foolish. Show me the being who can think of seven billion people as seven billion individual people and I'll show you someone who is not human. Neither I nor you have the cognitive ability to think of seven billion anything without using tools like statistics. So when you advise me to throw away one of the few tools we humans have for thinking of large numbers of anything without even the slightest advise as a replacement for that tool, you're just trying to make our collective ignorance worse.
And of course, you have nothing to say of the rituals of health care itself. Certainly thinking of seven billion people as seven billion people doesn't make health care work any better since one can't help all seven billion people at once (much less help them with that point of view).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:34PM (2 children)
The article didn't, of course. You even had to rationalize why the counterexample of the story wasn't a counterexample. It's just another of your silly assertions. In the distant past, most retired people were dead people. Not much contributing to humanity progress happening there. Meanwhile old people today at least are living long enough to inspire younger generations, do a modest amount of work, and come up with interesting ideas like this one.
It does make me wonder why someone can exhort me to think of people as people, and then make glaring errors of thought like the above. It's almost like viewpoint is inherently broken.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:46PM (1 child)
Oh! So you do agree that at least some of the retired people today provide value for the society and worth prolonging their life with mere years, in defiance of your "changing one's life span (if you're male) from 75 years to 80... Not very interesting at present for the money spent." assertion?
How do you manage to keep the two conflicting ideas in your head in the same time?
Of course it didn't. Glad you actually got it, your "What's new about that?" didn't sound too encouraging.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:49AM
Who said otherwise? Not me. Read the end of the quote you put up there. "Not very interesting for money spent." Why is it so hard to think about cost? I guess it's just a perception and cognitive problem common to all humans.
I think if living that five years more meant someone had to die, you'd get it real fast. But when it's just boatloads of money getting pushed around, you don't see the lives being squandered.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:25PM (3 children)
I see you are passionate about statistics.
How about you read that paper instead of getting sidetracked by a wannabe-sarcastic friendly trolling exercise?
(and maybe ponder a bit on the "1 death a tragedy, X>10K is a statistic"; as misattributed [wikiquote.org] as it is, there is a sorta sociopathic ring to it. I feel like it has even more of that ring if one discards the "single death a tragedy" part; but maybe that's just me)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:49PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:57PM (1 child)
Thanks for your kind consideration, at my age it's hard to read something in the time slices I'm waiting for the compilation to finish. But, whaddaya know, those intervals are perfect for letting my monkey fingers do the trolling.
Anyway, don't despair. I'll eventually get to the useless age of retirement and I'll probably read it.
(back to coding some more compilation errors. See yea later)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:26PM
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:37PM
Not only that but he is a male in STEM, which means that he is an incel. This is why we need to strengthen
ObamacareHillarycare instead of wasting our time with single payer or medicare for all, which as we can see only produces incels!This is proof that his proof is excluding women from STEM, because he hates women and can't get laid!
Death to incels! Police, etc.