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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 07 2018, @09:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the pics-or-it-didn't-happen dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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

Abstract

Paper


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday August 07 2018, @10:55AM (17 children)

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Tuesday August 07 2018, @10:55AM (#718181)

    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....

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:27AM (8 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:27AM (#718185) Journal

    Thank's for posting the ArX link , the wired piece was a bit *too* fluffy for my delicate morning senses....

    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)

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:47AM (#718190)

      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

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 07 2018, @12:04PM (#718194) Journal

        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)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 07 2018, @12:12PM (#718196) Journal
      Look at the link "Paper" above. Probably should have linked to the abstract link [arxiv.org] though. Then one doesn't need to download the PDF to read a little about the paper first.
      • (Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:33PM (1 child)

        by Fnord666 (652) on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:33PM (#718257) Homepage
        Thanks for the feedback. I have added a link to the abstract and will link to those in the future.
        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @10:19PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 07 2018, @10:19PM (#718469) Journal
          Also, if you're given the PDF URL (and can't recall how to modify the URL to get the abstract link), the abstract can easily be found by internet searching for the eight digit number of the article which is embedded in the PDF URL.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:23PM (2 children)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:23PM (#718253) Journal

      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

        by Fnord666 (652) on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:30PM (#718255) Homepage
        Will do going forward. Thanks for the feedback!
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:43PM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:43PM (#718262) Journal

        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)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:29PM (#718224) Journal

    and there was no university to claim credit or pimp it. Hence "unknown", in case *another* Uni. got the press...

    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)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 07 2018, @02:13PM (#718250) Journal

      There's way too much crap posted to free online repositories, so the signal-to-noise ratio is problematic.

      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)

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:43PM (#718513) Journal

        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)

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:05AM (#718524) Journal

          Why can't you have both?

          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)

            by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday August 08 2018, @02:24AM (#718603) Journal

            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)

              by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 08 2018, @02:31AM (#718606) Journal

              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

                by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:19PM (#718744) Journal

                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

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:58PM (#718778)

      Maybe he just didn't care much and wanted a quick and easy way to publish.

      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.